At the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon (FDUL), the Theory of Evidence and Evidence Law have found a place in the programmes of some of the curricular units of the three Cycles of Study: Bachelor's Degree, Master's Degree in Law and Legal Practice (MDPJ), Master's Degree in Law and Legal Science (MDCJ) and PhD.
In recent years, there have been important teaching offerings in Evidence Law, both in the civil and criminal fields. In addition to the Probation Law course in the MDPJ - Forensic Legal Sciences Speciality, the Criminal Procedural Law course in the MDCJ - Criminal Law and Criminal Sciences Speciality has, for several academic years, been entirely dedicated to criminal evidence.
With some annual variations, the programme has been specially designed to offer a global view of criminal evidence. For several years, the main researchers, Paulo de Sousa Mendes and Rui Soares Pereira, have been promoting projects on Evidence Theory and Criminal Evidence Law within FDUL and outside FDUL with other institutions and research centres, involving the publication of works.
First and foremost, the co-organisation of the III International Conference on Quantitative Justice and Fairness - Inference and Causality, in Lisbon, on 22, 23 and 24 May 2012, resulted in the co-editing, together with Vern R. Walker, Qing Pan and Rainhard Bengez, of the special edition of the journal Law, Probability & Risk, no. 3/4 (2013). I should also highlight my participation in the transnational research project of the Centre for Latin American Criminal and Procedural Law Studies (CEDPAL) of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, entitled "Fundamentals of Evidence Law in Criminal Matters", which began at the end of 2015 in Göttingen and met twice, in Lima, Peru, on 26, 27 and 28 September 2016, and in Ushuaia, Argentina, on 12, 13 and 14 October 2017, to discuss the texts subsequently published in two collective works by Tirant lo Blanch, one in Spanish and the other in Portuguese, respectively entitled Fundamentos de Derecho Probatorio en Materia Penal (2019) and Fundamentos de Derecho Probatorio en Materia Penal (2020). Finally, it is worth emphasising the book Prova Penal Teórica e Prática, published by Almedina in 2019, to which lecturers from FDUL, the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto and law schools in Brazil contributed.
In addition to these projects and works, Almedina published two volumes in 2020 and 2023 entitled New Challenges for Criminal Evidence, which include around 30 studies by students on FDUL's Master's in Law and Legal Science, who responded to the challenge of carrying out in-depth and comparative research on specific topics in the field of criminal evidence law.
In recent years, other projects have been carried out by these principal investigators in conjunction with researchers from other research centres and foreign universities, both in the field of Evidence Law in general and in the field of the interconnection of evidence with artificial intelligence. In this regard, it is worth highlighting the 2nd Quaestio Facti Workshop, coordinated by Jordi Ferrer Béltran, Kai Ambos and Paulo de Sousa Mendes, which took place at FDUL on 26 and 27 April 2022, as well as the International Workshop "Artificial Intelligence Applied to Law", coordinated by Luís Greco, Paulo de Sousa Mendes, Rui Soares Pereira and João Marques Martins, which also took place at FDUL on 20 April 2020.
Several modules of the Postgraduate course in Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice and its Regulation, coordinated by Paulo de Sousa Mendes and João Marques Martins, have also been dedicated to the relationship between criminal evidence and artificial intelligence. The aim now is to take advantage of the knowledge and research experience accumulated in recent years, as well as the partnerships established with other Research Centres, Law Faculties and Universities, in order to fill a gap in the international and European context with regard to the systematic and comprehensive treatment of judicial evidence. Maintaining a theoretical and practical focus and continuing to encourage the use of the case method, the project aims to delve deeper into the subject of judicial evidence, with the participation of national and foreign researchers who have been dedicated to the subjects of evidence and evidentiary law for several years.
To this end, international events on current and complex topics of judicial evidence will be used for the researchers to present their research and collect contributions from the other participants to make improvements to their papers. The papers will then be published as a collective work and/or in a journal with double blind peer review. The publications will be in Spanish and English. Almedina's collection, New Challenges in Criminal Evidence, will also be continued with the publication of 4 new volumes.
Finally, a collective work will be prepared for publication by an international publisher, in English, with a view to providing a systematic and comprehensive treatment of judicial evidence without parallel in the continental European context.
The project will consist of 2 main phases.
Phase 1 is underway and comprises the following 5 sub-phases:
- Seminars on Technology and Evidence (online) and a final conference at FDUL (in person) - March 2025 (Lisbon), as part of Fundamentals of Evidence in Criminal Matters - Part Two;
- IV Workshop Quaestio Facti (University of Göttingen) 16/17 September 2024;
- Publication of the book Tecnologia e Prueba (in Spanish, by Tirant lo blanch, Spain);
- Publication of the articles from the IV Quaestio Facti Workshop, after double blind peer review, in English, in the Quaestio Facti Magazine;
- Publication of New Challenges for Criminal Evidence, Vols. III and IV, in Almedina, in 2024 and 2025.
Phase 2 includes:
- Publication of New Challenges in Criminal Evidence, Vols. V and VI, at Almedina, in 2026 and 2027;
- Preparation of a collective work, in English, entitled Treatise on Theoretical and Practical Judicial Evidence, with an international publisher (e.g. Springer, Nomos, Elgar, OUP).
National and international researchers will play a particularly important role in all phases and sub-phases. It is hoped that the work carried out will further promote the study of judicial evidence at FDUL and other Portuguese and foreign Faculties and Universities and will contribute to the creation of future CIDP courses and seminars on this subject.