Evidence Law and its Tower of Babel

Abstract

The paper reviews practices in the creation of legal evidence knowledge under legal-academic contexts. One of the issues studied is whether theories and explanations proposed in those contexts are incremental or not. This aspect impacts not only in the depth and details achieved, but also in the degree of consolidation of the very same legal discipline (Evidence Law). The study of citations in papers published in Chilean Journals indexed in WoS (former ISI) and SCIELO shows that there is a mid-low level of cohesion among scholars. Therefore, the dynamic in the production of knowledge is partially incremental. The dispersion in analysis perspectives (legal theory or jurisprudence) explains, for the most part, the aforementioned finding. In order for the legal discipline to progress, it is important to agree among aims and to reach conceptual consensus so as to favor the creation of knowledge complex enough to satisfy social requirements in evidence issues.