Book Review by William H. Page
One of the ways parties compete in litigation is by telling stories they hope the decisionmaker will believe. Judges and juries then must evaluate the plausibility of the conflicting accounts based on the evidence and their own “world knowledge”—their understanding of how things normally occur and how human beings normally behave. We ordinarily think of world knowledge as simply an awareness of physical laws, language, and other relatively neutral background facts. But ideology—our guiding sense of causation in social processes—is also an element of world knowledge. Prevailing ideologies thus may deeply affect the decisionmakers' choice between competing stories.
About the Author
William H. Page. J. Will Young Professor of Law, Mississippi College School of Law. B.A., Tulane University, 1973; J.D., University of New Mexico, 1975; LL.M., University of Chicago, 1979.
Citation
68 Tul. L. Rev. 1029 (1994)