The Faculty of Law has awarded the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa for 2024 to Professor David Lagnado, University College London (UCL). Lagnado is a world-leading scholar in the field of legal evidence, and his interdisciplinary research approach combines law with decision theory and cognitive science.
Lagnado investigates empirically how legal fact-finders reason when they evaluate evidence, and he has developed methods to help them avoid various reasoning-errors. A notable example of his research is the discovery of the so-called Zero-Sum Fallacy, where competing hypotheses in a criminal case (the prosecutor's hypothesis and the defendant's story) are mistakenly treated as if they were exhaustive and mutually exclusive, resulting in the evidence being over-estimated or under-estimated. The methods developed by Lagnado to help legal fact-finders assess evidence correctly are based on state-of-the-art research in psychology on the conceptualization of causal relationships between hypotheses and evidence, and uses Bayesian networks to model legal evidence.
For an accessible introduction to his findings see Lagnado Explaining the Evidence (Cambridge University Press, 2021). There has for many years been a close and scientifically fruitful co-operation between Lagnado’s research group at UCL and the research group LEVIC - Law, Evidence and Cognition at Lund University led by Professor Christian Dahlman.
Lagnado will receive his award at the ceremony in Lund cathedral May 31 2024.