Known Unknowns: Tracing a Map

This chapter combines the insights of the volume’s various analyses to develop an overarching picture of the problem of intractable factual uncertainty and the approaches that legal systems have taken to it. This problem is persistent and endemic across legal systems and engages their fundamental elements and principles. The analysis is therefore vital in combatting inconsistency and incoherence in our legal frameworks, and in guiding interactions with new or recurrent instances of the difficulty, which can otherwise appear insurmountable and profoundly affect litigation outcomes and the operation of the justice system. The chapter thus considers themes emerging across the diverse areas of legal material considered, understood against the methodological and substantive background outlined in chapter one. Conclusions and insights are developed in three core parts: an overview picture of uncertainty’s features, how it presents, and how it is understood and confronted; the identification of themes and points of engagement demonstrating the wider contextual factors that characterise, define, and restrain the operation of uncertainty and mould our confrontations with it; and the development of a summary toolkit to help analyse, and guide approaches to, intractable factual uncertainty.