Presumptions Broad and Narrow
I am grateful to the respondents for their thoughtful and challenging papers, which give me much to think about. In this short reply I cannot deal adequately with, or even address, all the issues they raise: all I can do here is discuss some of the general, more methodological, issues about the approach that I took in my original paper – issues clustering around the question of whether we should talk of the presumption of innocence only as a specific legal doctrine that operates within the criminal process; or more broadly of presumptions of innocence that also function in other criminal law contexts, and outside the law in our civic dealings with each other and with the state. My respondents show that my appeal to this broader conception of the PoI in my original paper was at least insufficiently clear; it remains to be seen whether it was fundamentally misguided.