In procedural-law scholarship as well as in the theoretical analysis of the notion of proof as a result of the joint assessment of all items of evidence introduced in a trial, reference is frequently made to notions such as the conviction, belief, or certainty of a judge or a jury member about what happened. All these notions underscore the mental states involved in the process of determining the facts on the part of a judge or a jury. In this analysis, I look at the links between beliefs and the justification in the findings of fact provided by the judge or jury in her or its verdict.

In this paper I address the issue of the normativity of instrumental rules (for example, legal rules). On the one hand, I criticize Scott Shapiro's “constraint model” of instrumental rule-following according to which instrumental rules have motivational clout qua rules: the agent conforms to them simply because they are rules. On the other, I argue for a purely epistemic account of instrumental rule-following. According to this account, instrumental rules inform the agent which action she is required to perform but do not get her to act. Rather the agent is motivationally guided by the reasons for which she adopted the instrumental rules.

This article strives to articulate some of the conventional foundations of law. The article consists of three main arguments. First, between H. L. A. Hart's conception of the rules of recognition and H. Kelsen's theory of the basic norm, Hart's view is more compelling. Second, the paper argues that the rules of recognition are social conventions but not of the familiar coordinative type, as some commentators have claimed. Finally, the article draws a distinction between deep and surface conventions, arguing that there are some deep conventions about what law is, and surface conventions that determine what counts as law in a particular community. This distinction between deep and surface conventions is employed to solve some of the puzzles about the nature of the rules of recognition.