Known Unknowns: Legal Responses to Intractable Factual Uncertainties

This project investigates, from a comparative historical perspective, the ways in which the law frames and responds to problems of intractable factual uncertainty.
Where our ordinary evidential rules simply cannot produce a satisfactory answer to a factual question, the substantive law must choose how to proceed. This might, for example, involve the creation of tiebreaking or default rules to resolve the impasse.
The project brings together papers on diverse areas of uncertainty across private law. It seeks to identify trends and inconsistencies in legal approaches to uncertainty, with a view to understanding the past and guiding the law’s future development in our increasingly complex societies.