On Wed, 9 Sep 2009, Pavitra wrote: > Kerim Aydin wrote: >> - If you take a legal/decision standpoint (where legally a decision >> must be made based on uncertain data - see particularly natural >> resource management for situations like this - a court CAN >> determine a likely outcome and make it the legal reality; for >> example by the court making a fair choice itself or delegating to >> the recordkeepor. > > This sounds very promising. I had assumed (after failing to find the > term "random" in a few online law dictionaries) that there was no legal > definition of the term. But if a non-catastrophic legal definition of > random exists, then R217s2 allows us to choose it over the catastrophic > mathematical definition, since R754(3) gives equal weight to each.
In legal language (and the current situation) we're talking about making a decision under "uncertainty" in what is. There are a lot of laws dealing with "decisionmaking when the true state of affairs is unknown but statistically measured". I think "randomness" in a legal sense is associated with "arbitrary and capricious" decisions which are in fact bad. For example, imaging a judge saying "both parents had an equally good case for child custody, so I'm flipping a coin." Though I suppose it may have come up if a judge were working with a contract that involved gambling or something. -G.
