Federico Picinali
Email: F.Picinali@lse.ac.uk
Room: New Academic Building 7.24
Tel. 020-7955-7265
I am an Italian legal scholar. I
earned a Degree in Legal Sciences and a Specialized Degree in Law at the
Università degli Studi di Milano. Afterward, I studied at the Yale Law
School and at the Università degli Studi di Trento, where I earned an LL.M.
and a Ph.D. in law, respectively. During these formative years I was
exchange student at the UC Berkeley School of Law and visiting researcher at
the UC Hastings College of the Law, at the Cardozo School of Law, and at
Penn Law. Just prior to becoming an LSE fellow, I have been visiting fellow
and teacher at the LSE Department of Law.
I have been admitted to the
Italian Bar.
Research interests
I am a scholar of criminal law and evidence law. My main
interest is in the philosophy underlying these two areas of law. In
particular, I tend to favour an interdisciplinary approach exploring the
connections between substantive legal reasoning and fact finding. My
research involves insights into epistemology, inductive logic, statistics,
moral philosophy, and philosophy of mind, whose teachings I consider
fundamental in attaining a comprehensive appreciation of criminal justice.
'Structuring Inferential Reasoning in Criminal Fact Finding:
An Analogical Theory' in Law, Probability & Risk (2012) 11 (2/3) pp.197-223
The article proposes a normative theory of inferential reasoning for criminal fact finding, centred on the concept of ‘analogy’. While evidence law scholars have devoted little attention to the topic, the article maintains that analogy deserves more consideration. In particular, it argues that an analogical theory of inferential reasoning has three main advantages. First, the theory makes it possible to incorporate within a single coherent framework the important insights of different approaches to ‘reasoning under uncertainty’; indeed, it welcomes both the Pascalian notion of ‘relevance’ based on the Bayesian likelihood ratio and the Baconian concept of ‘weight’. Secondly, it helps advance the conventional understanding of the reference class problem, an evidential conundrum widely discussed in the recent legal scholarship. Finally, the theory allows for a functional taxonomy of reasonable doubts.
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'A Retributive Justification for not Punishing Bare Intentions
or: on the Moral Relevance of the ‘Now-Belief' in Law and Philosophy
(2012)
According to criminal law a person should not be punished for a bare intention
to commit a crime. While theorists have provided consequentialist and epistemic
justifications of this tenet, no convincing retributive justification thereof
has yet been advanced. The present paper attempts to fill this lacuna through
arguing that there is an important moral difference between a future-directed
and a present-directed intention to act wrongfully. Such difference is due to
the restraining influence exercised in the decisional process by the
‘now-belief’, i.e. the belief that the time has come to act, which is
exclusively involved in the latter type of intention.
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'Factual Inference as Analogical Reasoning. A Comment on Peter
Tillers’s "The Structure of Proof in Modern Trials"’ in Law, Probability &
Risk, 10, p. 7 (2011)
Diritto Penale, Patteggiamento e Ragionevole Dubbio, in
Rivista Italiana di Diritto e Procedura Penale, 52, p. 1457 (2009)
L’Accertamento Sintomatico nella Nuova Fattispecie di Guida
Sotto l’Influenza dell’Alcool alla Prova del Ragionevole Dubbio, in Corriere
del Merito, 23, p. 601 (2008)
