Law, Probability and Risk: a journal of reasoning under uncertainty. Call for Papers Papers are requested for a new journal entitled Law, Probability and Risk, aimed primarily at academic lawyers, mathematicians and statisticians. The journal seeks to publish papers that deal with topics on the interface of law and probabilistic reasoning. These will be interpreted broadly to include aspects relevant to the interpretation of scientific evidence, the assessment of uncertainty and the assessment of risk. Examples include: evaluation, interpretation and presentation of evidence, estimation of compensation for serious injuries, the relevance and reliability of genetic tests for insurance purposes with consequent considerations of legal or quasi-legal criteria for allowable discrimination; legal conflicts affecting the efficiency of credit scoring on the basis of the different types of data permitted to be held by credit bureaux in the U.K., the U.S. and the rest of Europe; the detection of fraudulent transactions live, using expert systems and statistical analyses; the drafting of legislation which is scientifically sound through the involvement of scientists and statisticians at this stage of legislation. Non-evidence law topics include environmental issues, mass torts, causation, risk assessment, medical and pharmaceutical litigation involving the evaluation of epidemiological and bio-statistical evidence according to legal criteria. The primary objective of the journal will be to cover issues in law which have a scientific element, with an emphasis on statistical and probabilistic issues and the assessment of risk. The primary readership includes academic lawyers interested in cases with a scientific element, particularly those which include the assessment of data but also including reasoning under uncertainty more generally, and legislators interested in drafting legislation which involves the assessment of uncertainty, such as statutory levels of pollutants in environmental legislation. The readership also includes statisticians and probabilists interested in the evaluation, interpretation and presentation of evidence. Examples of topics which may be covered include communications law, computers and the law, environmental law, law and medicine, regulatory law for science and technology, identification problems (such as DNA but including other materials), sampling issues (drugs, computer pornography, fraud), offender profiling, credit scoring, risk assessment, the role of statistics and probability in drafting legislation, the assessment of competing theories of evidence (possibly with a view to forming an optimal combination of them). In addition, a whole new area is emerging in the application of computers to medicine and other safety-critical areas. New legislation is required to define the responsibility of computer experts who develop software for tackling these safety-critical problems. Editors: C.G.G. Aitken (Statistics - University of Edinburgh) F. Taroni (Forensic Science - University of Lausanne) P. Tillers (Law - Cardozo School of Law, New York) M. Redmayne (Law - London School of Economics)
