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Professor Federico Picinali

Professor of Law
LSE Law School

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About

About

I earned a Degree in Legal Sciences and a Specialized Degree in Law at the Università degli Studi di Milano. I then 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 an exchange student at the UC Berkeley School of Law and a 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 Assistant Professor at LSE Law School, I was a visiting fellow at LSE Law School and a LSE Fellow. More recently, I have been a visiting scholar at Bocconi University, School of Law. I have been admitted to the Italian Bar.

I teach and research in criminal law and evidence law, with a particular interest in theoretical approaches to these subjects. I have written on the criminal standard of proof, on inferential reasoning in legal fact-finding, on statistical evidence, on improperly obtained evidence, on criminal intention and on self-defence, among other topics. I have published in several journals, including the Modern Law Review, Law & Philosophy, the Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, Criminal Law & Philosophy, the International Journal of Evidence & Proof, Jurisprudence, Law, Probability & Risk and Episteme. In 2022 I published Justice In-Between, a monograph on intermediate criminal verdicts for the Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice Series (OUP).

I am currently investigating the role of perspective-taking in criminal adjudication and, especially, how it affects the evaluation of evidence.

I am the coordinator of the LSE Criminal Justice Forum

I live in Sheffield with my wife – philosopher Jules Holroyd – our two daughters and our dog. I am a keen rock climber and often visit the crags of the nearby Peak District.

Awards

  • Winner of the LSE Student-Led Teaching Excellence Award 2017 in the category ‘Feedback and Communication’
  • My paper ‘Base Rates of Negative Traits: Instructions for Use in Criminal Trials’, inJournal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 33(1), pp. 69-88 (2016) won the prize for best essay published in the Journal of Applied Philosophyin 2016 (the prize included a monetary award, and free registration and accommodation for the next Society for Applied Philosophy annual conference)
  • Nominee for the LSE Student-Led Teaching Excellence Awards, 2015 and 2016
  • Class Teacher Prize, awarded by the LSE Law Department, 2013