Sergey Budylin’s Open Lecture on Judicial Proof

On 11 February, Sergey Budylin, Candidate of Sciences (Physics and Mathematics), Master of Laws, senior lawyer at Roche & Duffay, was the guest of the regular postgraduate workshop / open lecture of the Institute. The event was moderated by Kirill Molodyko, leading research fellow of the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development.

Due to a large number of registration requests, the organizers had to close registration for the event 5 days before its start. Although our events are traditionally held in packed lecture rooms, the interest for this particular workshop went far beyond academia (students, teachers, post-graduate students from various departments of the Higher School of Economics, MGIMO, Russian School of Private Law, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Kutafin Moscow State Law University, Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, Moscow Higher School of Social and Economic Sciences (Shaninka), RANEPA), in-house lawyers and private lawyers.

Liquidators, appraisers, court experts experts also attended the event and took an active part in discussions.

Sergei Budylin, widely known for his studies in the theory of judicial proof and Anglo-Saxon law, presented the results of his new research on how judges and members of the jury are to evaluate evidence from the perspective of probabilistic approaches. Translating complex mathematical concepts and formulas into a language understandable to lawyers, the speaker dwelt in detail on:

—    how mathematicians describe proving,

—    difference of the theory of evidence from the traditional ("Bayesian") approach,

—    what is a belief function and a plausibility function,

—    theory of choice and standards of proof,

—    application of the theory to moot cases.

According to Sergey Budylin, the concepts of evidence and proof are among the most important in law.

Proving is the establishment of facts by evaluating evidence, that is, certain objects and messages (witness testimony) perceived by the senses. The mathematical theory of proof (its other names are the theory of evidence, the Dempster-Shafer theory, the theory of belief functions) provides answers to some of the controversial issues that arise when one tries to directly apply the “conventional” probability theory to the process of proving in court. If in the not-so-distant future a case is decided by a robot judge, it is important at least to know which algorithms are incorporated into his fact finding subsystem.

In the second part of the three-hour event, Mr. Budylin answered numerous questions and comments from the audience.

www.zakon.ru is the strategic information partner of the event.