In Chapter 3, the decision maker was treated as unitary: the same individual, or undifferentiated group of individuals, was treated as responsible for all the actions necessary to decision making. In particular, this decision maker had responsibility for making both the principal decision – to accept the claim or to reject it – and the preemptive decision – to postpone (or not to postpone) the principal decision to allow for the augmentation of Keynesian weight, as well as the responsibility for conducting the investigations that would effectuate such augmentation. In this chapter, this assumption is relaxed. I differentiate between the roles of the various persons and subsidiary groups of persons (such as juries), who participate in decision making in the adjudicative context. This allows me to work out some of the implications of the foregoing analysis for practical adjudication.

Of course, the devil is in such details, and because the roles of adjudicative participants are complex and not so clearly delineated as one might expect, there is more here with which the legal practitioner or academic lawyer may want to disagree. Still, the framework developed in the preceding two chapters will motivate insights that otherwise are not available, and the result is a coherent theory of adjudicative proof burdens and their management. I do not, of course, claim that the resulting theory captures every nuance of our adjudicative systems. As emphasized at the end of Chapter 3, there are a number of goals and concerns that can compete with the essentially epistemic focus presented in this book. Still, it is striking just how much of our extant practices are illuminated by the present analysis.