Henry Zhuhao Wang (Florida State University – College of Law) has posted Inference Rules Reconsidered (102 Indiana Law Journal __ (forthcoming 2027)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Evidence law is built around gates of admissibility. Its core doctrines regulate what information may be heard, excluded, or conditionally admitted. But in modern adjudication—dominated by bench trials, administrative proceedings, and arbitration—the decisive work is rarely done at the gate. It is done in the reasoning that connects admitted evidence to findings of fact. This Article argues that contemporary evidence law is therefore conceptually incomplete: it possesses an elaborate law of admissibility, but no explicit law of inference.
Recovering a tradition largely obscured by the rise of jury-centered gatekeeping, the Article shows that legal systems have long regulated not only what evidence may be considered, but how it may justify belief. Modern doctrine continues to do so, though in a dispersed and untheorized way—through constitutional constraints on factfinding, presumptions and burdens of proof, expert methodology, and the negative architecture of exclusionary rules. The Federal Rules of Evidence, on this view, are best understood as a system of negative inference rules: they forbid particular inferential moves while presupposing, but almost never articulating, the standards that make other inferential paths legally acceptable.
The Article’s central contribution is to reconstruct those missing standards. It develops a unified framework of positive inference rules—mid-level principles that organize and discipline legal reasoning under uncertainty without mechanizing judgment—organized around four justificatory foundations: probabilistic reliability, institutional efficiency, constitutional and moral principles, and methodological guidance for complex proof. In doing so, it reorients evidence law from a regime of exclusion toward an articulated framework for reasoning from evidence to fact.