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STOP PRESS - TOMORROW! You are invited to a joint RSS General Applications Section and Manchester Local Group meeting on Statistics and the Law. No booking is necessary - we will be pleased to see you. Full details including links to maps etc are on the Manchester LG web site at www.rss-manchester.org but briefly the location and short details are: January 11th 2006 at MMU All Saints West Building, Room 2.05, 2.00 prompt to 5.30pm (tea at 3.30pm) Speakers: Tony Gardner-Medwin, UCL Reasonable Doubt: What kind of probability is at issue? I shall challenge the conventional view that "beyond reasonable doubt" in criminal trials is a matter of a high threshold on the probability of guilt. Could the evidence have arisen for innocent persons with non-negligible frequency? Addressing uncertainties and probabilities conditional on the hypothesis of innocence becomes the most critical issue for a jury to address. David J Balding, Imperial College Assessing relatedness between groups of individuals Despite the wide acceptance of likelihood ratios in establishing relatedness by DNA profiling, there remain many complexities. These will be discussed with related issues in the context of a group of individuals, each the offspring of anonymous donor insemination, who wished to know which, if any, of them had a common natural father. First and Second Order interactions with the Law Patrick J Laycock, University of Manchester My 'first order interactions' involve court appearances and have lately concerned Crown prosecution statements about the detection of drugs on bank notes. I will discuss some of the statistical problems raised in these and other cases and attempt to convey some of the pleasures and frustrations they have brought me. Stephen Senn, Glasgow How much shyster do you want with your quack? In this litigious age the public seems to have extravagant expectations as to what medicine ought to deliver and no 'accident' occurs without someone being to blame. I consider some implications of public expectation of proof of non-harm for patients, physicians, investigative journalists, lawyers, drug developers and regulators and statisticians. John Logsdon Secretary RSS Manchester Local Group [log in to unmask] http://www.rss-manchester.org