Don ’ T Teach Statistics to Lawyers !

Many lawyers have been taught statistics at school or university. The conventional teaching of statistics, particularly in “service courses”, leads to lawyers absorbing a number of fallacies. These include: • probability assessments can only be made on the basis of long runs and repeated experiments • there is a distinction between “legal probability” and “mathematical probability”. What lawyers need to be taught is not techniques for manipulating statistical data but a logical and principled approach to reasoning in conditions of uncertainty.