A paradigm shift is underway in scholarship on legal fact-finding. Recent work clearly and consistently suggests that persuasion is the product of purely comparative assessments of factual propositions. This paper comments on the philosophical roots of the comparative paradigm. It also highlights two outstanding challenges for the comparative approach: (1) specification of a purely comparative test for the beyond a reasonable doubt standard, and (2) articulation of the mechanics by which unspecific or disjunctive factual propositions are supposed to be weighed in comparative fact-finding.
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