ABSTRACT
There are, of course, two main avenues through which cultural assumptions are brought into the courts, by others or by the judges themselves. The former involves lawyers, witnesses, experts, the background knowledge of jurors, and the occasional fact-finding master appointed by the court. Uncertainty itself, of course, takes a cultural form. Sir Henry Maine, speaking about an early period in the British common law, observed "that substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure". Procedure shapes the process by which information comes before the trier of fact, through presumptions and exclusions, determinations of the weight of evidence and the process of cross-examination. Personal intuition can certainly play a key role. In the American case, a significant part of that form is couched in terms of the quantifiable.
