  Over a century ago, Oliver Wendell Holmes invited scholars to look at the law
through the lens of probability theory: "The prophecies of what the courts will
do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law." Yet few
legal scholars have taken up this intriguing invitation. As such, in place of
previous approaches to the study of law, this paper presents a non-normative,
mathematical approach to law and the legal process. Specifically, we present a
formal Bayesian model of civil and criminal litigation, or what we refer to as
the litigation game; that is, instead of focusing on the rules of civil or
criminal procedure or substantive legal doctrine, we ask and attempt to answer
a mathematical question: what is the posterior probability that a defendant in
a civil or criminal trial will be found liable, given that the defendant has,
in fact, committed a wrongful act?
