C.S. Peirce on law and the search for truth

In comments on an exchange on the infamous non-hang-up hang-up case, Monroe left me and Clare with the query: What ever happened to the search for truth?  That sent me in search of my misplaced copy of The Essential Peirce, the source of my favorite quotation on the subject.  From Deduction, Induction, and Hypothesis (Popular Science Monthly, 1878): 

"Some persons fancy that bias and counter-bias are favorable to the extraction of truth--that hot and partisan debate is the way to investigate.  This is the theory of our atrocious legal procedure.  But Logic puts its heel upon this suggestion.  It irrefragably demonstrates that knowledge can only be furthered by the real desire for it, and that the methods of obstinancy, of authority, and every mode of trying to reach a foregone conclusion, are absolutely of no value."

Peirce was a brilliant man, and to read him (for me, at least) is to be humbled.  But it is good to keep in mind in reading this quotation that he was a natural and not a social scientist.  No geologic formation ever planted evidence and then lied about it.  

DM