Peter Tillers, American scholar of the

law of evidence The law of evidence, also known as the rules of evidence, encompasses the rules and legal principles that govern the proof of facts in a legal proceeding. These rules determine what evidence must or must not be considered by the trier of fa ...

, was born in

Riga Riga ( ) is the capital, Primate city, primate, and List of cities and towns in Latvia, largest city of Latvia. Home to 591,882 inhabitants (as of 2025), the city accounts for a third of Latvia's total population. The population of Riga Planni ...

, Latvia, in 1943 and arrived in the United States in 1950. He was educated at

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

(A.B., 1966) and

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United ...

(J.D., 1969, LL.M., 1972). He was Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, New York, from 1986. He died on October 3, 2015. Tillers was a reviser of

John Henry Wigmore John Henry Wigmore (1863–1943) was an American lawyer and legal scholar known for his expertise in the law of evidence and for his influential scholarship. Wigmore taught law at Keio University in Tokyo (1889–1892) before becoming the firs ...

's multi-volume treatise on the law of evidence and published a variety of articles on evidence, inference, and investigation. He was an editor of the Oxford journal ''Law, Probability and Risk''. Tillers was chairman and secretary of the Evidence Section of the

Association of American Law Schools The Association of American Law Schools (AALS), formed in 1900, is a non-profit organization of 175 law schools in the United States. An additional 19 schools pay a fee to receive services but are not members. AALS incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non- ...

. He was a Fellow of Law & Humanities at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

and a Senior

Max Rheinstein Max Rheinstein (July 5, 1899 − July 9, 1977) was a German-born American jurist and political scientist. He was for many years a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. Biography Max Rheinstein was born on July 5, 1899, in Bad Kreuz ...

Fellow at the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich, LMU or LMU Munich; ) is a public university, public research university in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Originally established as the University of Ingolstadt in 1472 by Duke ...

. He was a visiting professor at

in the spring semester of 2002. Professor Tillers was legal adviser for the

Latvia Latvia, officially the Republic of Latvia, is a country in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is one of the three Baltic states, along with Estonia to the north and Lithuania to the south. It borders Russia to the east and Belarus to t ...

n mission to the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

during the 48th Session of the General Assembly. He maintains
website
with discussion of a wide range of general issues of evidence. Tillers' scholarship focused on evidential inference and fact investigation in legal settings. He maintained that multiple methods of marshaling and analyzing evidence are important in trials and in pretrial investigation and informal fact discovery (and in many other human domains). He maintained that inference networks offer a useful window into investigative discovery and proof at trial. But he believed that subjective, synthetic, and gestalt-like perspectives on evidence, inference, and proof are also essential. (This aspect of his thinking about evidential inference is almost undoubtedly attributable to his early interest in

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German Philosophy, philosopher and one of the central Age of Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works ...

, G.W.F. Hegel, and, in general,

German Idealism German idealism is a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...

.) Tillers came to the conclusion that real headway in the study of human inference (and of much else) can be made if and only if it is understood that the human animal is an ''intelligent organism'' that "thinks" both at a conscious and subconscious level; he believed that Aristotle was fundamentally right in the way he, Aristotle, viewed (wo)man and his (her) place in the cosmos.

Publications

*Editor, ''Evidence Module'

of ''Spindle Law'

(draft released, Nov. 16, 2009) *
Crime, Procedure, and Evidence in a Comparative and International Context
' (2008) (co-edited with John Jackson & Maximo Langer) *
The Dynamics of Judicial Proof: Computation, Logic, and Common Sense
' (2002) (co-edited with Marilyn MacCrimmon) * ''Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence: The Uses and Limits of Bayesianism'' (1988) (co-edited with Eric Green), republished as ''L'Inferenza nel diritto probabilistica nel diritto delle prove: Usi e limiti del bayesianesimo'' (A. Mura trans., Giuffre editore, 2003) * Vols. I & IA ''Wigmore on Evidence'' (P. Tillers rev. 1983)

References

External links

Peter Tillers web page
(archived)

(archived)
Tillers blog on evidence and inference

Peter Tillers google scholar profile
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tillers, Peter 1943 births American legal scholars Scholars of evidence law Yale University alumni Harvard Law School alumni Cardozo School of Law faculty Latvian emigrants to the United States 2015 deaths