False Positives and False Negatives in Law: Thinking of Blackstone’s Formulation as a Loss Function
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Harry Surden, Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado; Affiliated Faculty, CodeX
Presented by CodeX—The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics
This event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided. Please register here.
Outside of law, various disciplines have developed frameworks for handling errors. For example, in medicine, if a diagnostic test incorrectly indicates that a healthy person has a disease, scientists formally classify such an error as a “false positive.” These decision-error frameworks can be useful for understanding error patterns. Within law, similar error scenarios frequently arise; however, they are typically considered only informally. This talk will sketch connections between formal decision-error concepts from the sciences, engineering, medicine, and statistics, and analogous situations within the legal context.