Mar 29, 2024  
2016-2017 Undergraduate Bulletin 
    
2016-2017 Undergraduate Bulletin [ARCHIVED BULLETIN]

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LAWU 2033 Law and Knowledge


(3 hours)
Explores the various ways in which law both creates knowledge and, more commonly, becomes a place in which disputes about knowledge are adjudicated. It is common place in law to say that we are trying to discover “what happened,” to “get to the bottom” of a case, to “discover the truth,” to produce knowledge. But the more you know about how trials work, the more difficult it is say that what a trial produces is knowledge. Plato famously said that knowledge is “justified true belief.” But how can we say which of our ideas are justified or true? There are some questions of truth or falsity which can be resolved fairly readily: “Does the earth revolve around the sun or vice versa?” Others are more
difficult but potentially solvable: “Is my friend lying to me?” And there are still others which cannot be confirmed, such as the existence of god or the meaning of life, and which have defied the efforts of philosophers for millennia.



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