Cases are not objects at hand for legal decision-making; cases are not echoes from a past crime. Cases are, first of all, made within compound discourse apparatus, here the English Crown Court and the procedure/s attached to it. This book reveals the legal production of cases including their relevant features. The socio-legal ethnography visits the natural sites of adversarial case-making: law firms, barristers’ chambers, and Crown Courts. It examines the role and dynamics of client-lawyer meetings, pre-trial hearings, plea bargaining sessions, and jury trials. It focuses on the lawyers’ case-making activities, their procedural contexts, and the resulting cases. As an ethnographic discourse study, the book develops a trans-sequential perspective on the interrelated events and processes of case-making – and by doing so, overcomes the shortcomings of talk-bias and text-bias. The trans-sequential approach pays out in detailed case studies on an alibi, on guilt, or the barrister’s notes; it pays out as well in cross-case studies dealing with legal care, procedural infrastructure, or the case system in the common law tradition.

Winner of the 2017 De Groot Prize awarded by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA)A relatively new area of research, adversarial risk analysis (ARA) informs decision making when there are intelligent opponents and uncertain outcomes. Adversarial Risk Analysis develops methods for allocating defensive or offensive resources against

Robert Kagan examines the origins and consequences of the American system of "adversarial legalism". This study aims to deepen our understanding of law and its relationship to politics, and raises questions about the future of the American legal system.

This book is about making machine learning models and their decisions interpretable. After exploring the concepts of interpretability, you will learn about simple, interpretable models such as decision trees, decision rules and linear regression. Later chapters focus on general model-agnostic methods for interpreting black box models like feature importance and accumulated local effects and explaining individual predictions with Shapley values and LIME. All interpretation methods are explained in depth and discussed critically. How do they work under the hood? What are their strengths and weaknesses? How can their outputs be interpreted? This book will enable you to select and correctly apply the interpretation method that is most suitable for your machine learning project.

Administrative asylum procedures are permeated by tensions between rationalities of legality, efficiency, and deterrence in asylum casework and their various effects on cases. Based on ethnographic research in the Swiss asylum administration, this book unveils the pragmatics and politics of rendering asylum cases resolvable by re-cording the lives of applicants in terms of asylum. With his reading of power and agency in administrations, Ephraim Pörtner offers a critical view of the intricate relationship between practices of asylum casework and the governmental need to resolve claims of people seeking protection.

The book provides a detailed praxeological analysis of a single NATO-airstrike in Afghanistan as a vivid example of how an event and its ex-post accountings shape and specify the legally required protection of civilians in armed conflict.

This study allows readers to get to grips with the conceptual tools and practical techniques for building robust machine learning in the face of adversaries.

The Crisis in America’s Criminal Courts highlights a variety of problems that judges, prosecutors, and public defenders face within a criminal justice system that is ineffective, unfair, and extraordinarily expensive. While many argue, and author, William R. Kelly, agrees, that crushing caseloads and court dockets certainly qualify as a crisis, Kelly suggests there is a much greater crisis in the courts that results in profound downstream effects on criminal justice performance and outcomes. It sounds simple, but the greatest risk faced by the justice system is the lack of time, expertise, and resources for effective decision-making. In this book, Kelly proposes a variety of evidence-based reforms that, as a start, provide the key decision-makers with professional clinical experts to accurately assess and advice regarding mitigating the circumstances that bring individuals into the courts. We must rebalance. We need incarceration for those who are too dangerous or violent or who are habitual offenders. For most of the rest, we need to manage risk, but very importantly, it is time to get serious about behavioral change. We need to change the culture of the courthouse and reorient how we think about crime and punishment.

What suspects tell the police may become a crucial piece of evidence when the case comes to court. But what happens to 'the suspect's statement' when it is written down by the police? Based on a unique set of data from over fifteen years' worth of research, Martha Komter examines the trajectory of the suspect's statement from the police interrogation through to the trial. She shows how the suspect's statement is elicited and written down in the police report, how this police report both represents and differs from the original talk in the interrogation, and how it is quoted and referred to in court. The analyses cover interactions in multiple settings, with documents that link one interaction to the next, providing insights into the interactional and documentary foundations of the criminal process and, more generally, into the construction, character and uses of documents in institutional settings.