For the moment, in the American legal academy, there seems to be a fair amount of support for the idea that the burden of proof in fact-finding is centered around a vigorous contest between the plausibility of competing stories advanced by the litigants. Professors Ronald Allen and Alex Stein, two well-respected evidence law scholars have written widely about this “relative plausibility” theory of adjudication and the burden of proof.[1] They claim to “demonstrate that factfinders decide cases predominantly by applying the relative plausibility criterion guided by inference to the best explanation … .”[2] As they see American courtroom practice, the norm is “the relative plausibility mode of factfinding involving a rigorous comparison between the parties’ stories about the individual event.”[3] They insist that their “theory aligns with ordinary people’s natural reasoning.”[4]
I am not so sure. Semantically, the authors’ choice of the term “plausibility” is curious. Plausibility in ordinary usage has only a tenuous relationship with epistemic warrant. Allen and Stein acknowledge that in law (as in science and in life), the “coin of the realm is truth.” Plausibility in epistemology and philosophy of science, however, is typically treated as a weak and often irrelevant factor in assessing the correctness of a factual (scientific) claim. A leading textbook of epidemiology, for instance, offers that
“[a] causal explanation is plausible if it appears reasonable or realistic within the context in which the hypothesized cause and its effect occur. *** Plausibility can change as the context evolves and will be misleading when current understanding is misleading or wrong.”[5]
A plausible fact is not the same as a known fact, or a well-established fact. In his oft-cited after-dinner speech, Sir Austin Bradford Hill, for instance, acknowledged that plausibility is a helpful but non-necessary consideration in evaluating an association for causality, but he cautions that plausibility
“is a feature I am convinced we cannot demand. What is biologically plausible depends on the biological knowledge of the day.”
Since Hill, many scientific writers have relegated plausibility to a limited role in assessing the correctness of a causal claim. In the language of a recent effort to modernize Hill’s factors, one author noted that “plausibility and analogy do not work well in most fields of investigation, and their invocation has been mostly detrimental.”[6]
To be sure, Allen and Stein do, in some places, make clear that they take plausibility to mean more than some uninformed Bayesian prior. Relative plausibility in their view thus has some connection to the coin of the realm. At least, fact finders are seen as considering more than the usual extent of plausibility; they must “determine which of the parties’ conflicting stories makes most sense in terms of coherence, consilience, causality, and evidential coverage.”[7]
Relativity of Plausibility
If we are truly concerned with “naturalism” (ordinary reasoning?) then we should give some weight to how people react to a claim that has support. In the real world, real people are implicitly aware of Brandolini’s Law. Inspired by his reading of Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow,[8] Alberto Brandolini articulated the “Bullshit Asymmetry Principle,” in a 2013 peer-reviewed tweet. According to Brandolini, The work needed to refute bullshit is [at least] an order of magnitude greater than the work needed to produce it.
Despite its crude name, the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle has a respected intellectual provenance. In 1845, economist Frédéric Bastiat expressed an early notion of the adage:
“We must confess that our adversaries have a marked advantage over us in the discussion. In very few words they can announce a half-truth; and in order to demonstrate that it is incomplete, we are obliged to have recourse to long and dry dissertations.”[9]
Recognition of Bullshit Asymmetry actually goes back to ancient times. The Roman lawyer and teacher of rhetoric, Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, known as Quintilian to his friends, addressed the principle in his Institutio Oratoria:
“The task of the accuser is consequently straightforward and, if I may use the phrase, vociferous; but the defence requires a thousand arts and stratagems.”[10]
Quintilian’s insight explains why most people, without invoking economic efficiency or grand moral theories, believe it is natural to place the burden of proof upon the accuser or the pursuer, as opposed to the defender.
The demands made upon us by claims and “stories,” often frivolous, result in our naturally evaluating the warrant (or plausibility if you insist) for a claim before we become mired down in assessing “relative plausibility.” Courts have developed procedural mechanisms, such as summary adjudication and expert witness gatekeeping, to avoid unnecessary detailed assessments of relative plausibility. Even when cases are submitted to the factfinder, the decision may be made solely on “plausibility” of the story proffered by the party with the burden of proof.
The framing of adjudication and the burden of proof as relative plausibility seems to contradict what often happens in American courtrooms. Frequently, the defense does not put forward a “story,” but attempts to show that the plaintiff’s story is rubbish. Indeed, litigation may end without the plausibility of the defense position ever being considered. In the litigation over health claims involving exposure to Agent Orange, Judge Jack Weinstein granted summary judgment because the plaintiffs’ medical causation case was weak and insufficient.[11] The defense may have been even weaker in terms of its “coherence, consilience, causality, and evidential coverage,” but the party with the burden of proof attracts the first round of critical scrutiny in the summary judgment process. In Agent Orange, Judge Weinstein found the plaintiffs’ “proofs” to be rather crummy, without regard for the strength or weakness of the defendants’ evidence.
Similarly, Judge Weinstein granted summary judgment on plaintiffs’ claims of systemic disease injury in the silicone gel breast implant litigation. In granting judgment, Judge Weinstein pretermitted the defendants’ motions to exclude plaintiffs’ expert witnesses on grounds of Rules 702 and 703. Again, without comparison with the defendants’ “story,” Judge Weinstein found the plaintiffs’ story to be insufficient.[12]
The situation in Agent Orange and in Silicone Gel often obtains in trial itself. Defendants are often unable to disprove the plaintiffs’ claim, and the law does not require them to do so. When the evidentiary display is insufficient to support a claim, it may well be insufficient to show the claim is false. Defendants may want to be able to establish their own “story,” but the best they may have to offer is a showing that the plaintiffs’ story is not credible. Allen and Stein suggest that “[t]heoretically, a defendant can simply deny the plaintiff’s complaint, … but this virtually never occurs.”[13] They cite to no empirical evidence in claiming that “a rigorous comparison between the parties’ stories about the individual event is the norm in American courtrooms.”[14]
As shown by the summary judgment examples above, the burden of proof means something quite different from Allen and Stein’s contention about relative plausibility. Before the advent of expert witness gatekeeping, one of the few ways that a party could challenge an adversary’s expert witness was to object that the plaintiff’s medical expert witnesses offered conflicting opinions on a key factual issue in dispute. In Pennsylvania, dismissals for inconsistent expert witness opinion testimony is known as the “Mudano rule,” for a 1927 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case that held that “there must be no absolute contradiction in their essential conclusions.”[15] The Mudano rule arises because the plaintiff must furnish consistent evidence on key issues, even though the jury could otherwise freely choose to accept some or all or none of the inconsistent expert witnesses’ testimony. The Mudano rule requires dismissal without regard to the “plausibility” or implausibility of the defense case.[16]
The Mudano rule follows from the plaintiff’s having the burden of proof. When the party with the burden of proof proffers two conflicting opinions, the guesswork is simply too palpable for an appellate court to tolerate. The rule does not apply to the defense case, should the defense mange to proffer two inconsistent expert witnesses on a key issue raised by plaintiff’s case.[17]
The party without the burden of proof on causation or other key issue requiring expert witness testimony need not present any expert testimony. And if the opposing party does present expert witnesses, the law does not require that they be as precise or certain as those presented by the party with the burden. As one work-a-day appellate court put the matter:
“Absent an affirmative defense or a counterclaim, the defendant’s case is usually nothing more than an attempt to rebut or discredit the plaintiff’s case. Evidence that rebuts or discredits is not necessarily proof. It simply vitiates the effect of opposing evidence. Expert opinion evidence, such as that offered by [the defendant] in this case, certainly affords an effective means of rebutting contrary expert opinion evidence, even if the expert rebuttal would not qualify as proof.”[18]
A defendant need not engage in “story telling” at all; it may present an expert witness to testify that the plaintiff’s causation claim is bogus, even if the alternatives are merely possible. This statement of law with respect to the required certitude of expert witnesses and the burden of proof comes from a Pennsylvania case, but it appears to be the majority rule.[19]
The asymmetry created by the epistemic requirements of the burden of proof undermines the simplistic model of a court, or jury, deciding the “relative plausibility” of a claim.
Jury Instructions
The typical jury instruction on expert witness opinion testimony also shows that the burden of proof may operate without the head-to-head comparison of “stories,” as suggested by Allen and Stein. Under the law of most states, the trier of fact is free to accept some, all, or none of an expert witness opinion. In New Jersey, for instance, jurors are instructed that they
“are not bound by the testimony of an expert. You may give it whatever weight you deem is appropriate. You may accept or reject all or part of an expert’s opinion(s).”[20]
The practice of American courts with respect to burden of proof does not support the reductionist formula offered by the evidence law scholars. Burden of proof has implications in terms of summary judgment and directed verdict practice, which seem glossed over by “relative plausibility.” Furthermore, in situations in which the factfinder assesses both parties’ stories for relative plausibility, it must reject the story from the party with the burden of proof, when that party fails to show its story is more likely than not correct, even when the opponent’s story has a lesser plausibility.
Cases almost always involve incomplete evidence, and so we should expect that evidential warrant, or relative plausibility, or posterior probability of both sides’ cases to be less than complete or 100 percent. If the party with the burden has a story with 40% probability, and then opponent’s story has a 30% probability, the case still results in a non-suit.
[1] Ronald J. Allen & Alex Stein, “Evidence, Probability, and the Burden of Proof,” 55 Ariz. L. Rev. 557 (2013) [cited herein as Allen & Stein]. They are not alone in endorsing relative plausibility, but for now I will key my observations to Allen and Stein’s early paper on relative plausibility.
[2] Id. at 4. Allen and Stein cite the classical proponents of inference to the best explanation, but they do not in this 2013 article describe or defend such inferences in detail. See Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (2d ed. 2004); Gilbert H. Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation,” 74 Philosophical Rev. 88 (1965).
[3] Allen & Stein at 14.
[4] Allen & Stein at 15.
[5] Tyler J. VenderWeele, Timothy L. Lash & Kenneth J. Rothman, “Causal Inference and Scientific Reasoning,” chap. 2, in Timothy L. Lash, et al., Modern Epidemiology 17, 20 (4th ed. 2021).
[6] Louis Anthony Cox, Jr., “Modernizing the Bradford Hill criteria for assessing causal relationships in observational data,” 48 Crit. Rev. Toxicol. 682, 684 (2018).
[7] Allen & Stein at 1.
[8] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).
[9] Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (1845), in The Bastiat Collection vol. 1, t 172 (2007).
[10] Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, book V, chapters 13-14 (Butler transl. 1920).
[11] In re Agent Orange Product Liab. Litig., 597 F. Supp. 740, 785 (E.D.N.Y. 1984), aff’d 818 F.2d 145, 150-51 (2d Cir. 1987) (approving district court’s analysis), cert. denied sub nom. Pinkney v. Dow Chemical Co., 487 U.S. 1234 (1988); In re “Agent Orange” Prod. Liab. Litig., 611 F. Supp. 1223 (E.D.N.Y. 1985), aff’d, 818 F.2d 187 (2d Cir. 1987), cert. denied, 487 U.S. 1234 (1988). See Peter H. Schuck, Agent Orange on Trial: Mass Toxic Disasters in the Courts (1987).
[12] In re Breast Implant Cases, 942 F. Supp. 958 (E.& S.D.N.Y. 1996).
[13] Allen & Stein at 12.
[14] Allen & Stein at 14.
[15] Mudano v. Philadelphia Rapid Transit Co., 289 Pa. 51, 60, 137 A. 104, 107 (1927).
[16] See Daniel E. Cummins, “The ‘Mudano’ Rule: Conflicting Expert Opinions Often Prove Fatal,” The Legal Intelligencer (Mar. 16, 2017). See also Brannan v. Lankenau Hospital, 490 Pa. 588, 596, 417 A.2d 196 (1980) (“a plaintiff’s case will fail when the testimony of his two expert witnesses is so contradictory that the jury is left with no guidance on the issue”); Menarde v. Philadelphia Transportation Co., 376 Pa. 497, 501, 103 A.2d 681 (1954). See also Halper v. Jewish Family & Children Services of Great of Philadelphia, 600 Pa. 145, 963 A.2d 1282, 1287-88 (2009).
[17] See Kennedy v. Sell, 816 A.2d 1153, 1159 (Pa. Super. 2003).
[18] Neal v. Lu, 365 Pa. Super. 464, 530 A.2d 103, 109-110 (1987); see also Jacobs v. Chatwani, 2007 Pa. Super. 102, 922 A.2d 950, 958-960 (2007) (holding that defense expert witnesses are not required to opinion to reasonable medical certainty). See generally James Beck, “Reasonable Certainty and Defense Experts,” Drug & Device Law (Aug. 4, 2011).
[19] Jordan v. Pinamont, 2007 WL 4440900, at *2 (E.D. Pa. May 8, 2007) (“Defendants are entitled to inform the jury of other medical conditions which reasonably could have caused Plaintiff’s complaints, even if it cannot be stated to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that Defendants’ proffered alternatives were, in fact, the cause”); Johnesee v. The Stop & Shop Co., 174 N.J. Super. 426, 416 A.2d 956, 959 (N.J. Super. App. Div. 1980) (holding that defense expert witness may criticize plaintiff’s expert witness’s opinion as unfounded even though he can offer only possible alternative causes); Holbrook v. Lykes Bros. Steamship Co., 80 F.3d 777, 786 (3d Cir. 1996) (affirming admission of defense expert testimony that plaintiff had failed to exclude radiation as a possible cause of his mesothelioma, but reversing judgment for the defense on other grounds); Wilder v. Eberhart, 977 F.2d 673, 676-77 (1st Cir. 1992) (applying New Hampshire law); Allen v. Brown Clinic, P.L.L.P., 531 F.3d 568, 574-75 (8th Cir. 2008) (applying South Dakota law).
[20] N.J. CHARGE 1.13, citing State v. Spann, 236 N.J. Super. 13, 21 (App Div. 1989). See Pennsylvania’s Suggested Standard Civil Jury Instructions. PA. SSJI (Civ), § 4.100, § 4.80 (2013) (providing that the jury is not required to accept an expert witness’s testimony); Nina Chernoff, Standard jury instruction in New York on expert testimony (2023) (“You may accept or reject such testimony, in whole or in part, just as you may with respect to the testimony of any other witness.”).