Although the last forty years has seen considerable growth in the use of statistics in legal proceedings, it is primarily classical statistical methods rather than Bayesian methods that have been used. Yet the Bayesian approach avoids many of the problems of classical statistics and is also well suited to a broader range of problems. This paper reviews the potential and actual use of Bayes in the law and explains the main reasons for its lack of impact on legal practice. These include misconceptions by the legal community about Bayes' theorem, over-reliance on the use of the likelihood ratio and the lack of adoption of modern computational methods. We argue that Bayesian Networks (BNs), which automatically produce the necessary Bayesian calculations, provide an opportunity to address most concerns about using Bayes in the law.

中文翻译：

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贝叶斯和定律。

尽管过去四十年来统计在法律诉讼中的使用有了相当大的增长，但所使用的主要是经典统计方法而不是贝叶斯方法。然而，贝叶斯方法避免了经典统计的许多问题，并且也非常适合更广泛的问题。本文回顾了贝叶斯在法律中的潜在和实际使用，并解释了其对法律实践缺乏影响的主要原因。其中包括法律界对贝叶斯定理的误解、过度依赖似然比的使用以及缺乏采用现代计算方法。我们认为，贝叶斯网络（BN）可以自动生成必要的贝叶斯计算，为解决在法律中使用贝叶斯的大多数担忧提供了机会。