A note on burdens of proof in civil litigation

摘要

It has been widely believed that who bears the burden of proof significantly affects the incentives of the legal parties. In particular, Hay and Spier (J Legal Stud 26:413-431, 1997) argues that if legal parties have a commonly accessible body of evidence (perfectly correlated pieces of evidence), the party who bears the burden of proof will present the evidence if and only if the evidence supports his position, while the other party (without the burden) will refrain from presenting it regardless of whether the evidence supports his position. In this paper, I claim that the result will be dramatically changed if the pieces of evidence that each party possesses are not perfectly correlated. I show that each party will present the evidence that supports his position whenever available, regardless of the burden of proof assignment. This implies that allocating the burden of proof does not matter in terms of information elicitation.