Legal historians remain split among at least four competing, unresolved accounts of reasonable doubt's origin, including Whitman's

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A 2016 survey of the reasonable-doubt historiography by international-criminal-law practitioner Michael G. Karnavas states that "scholars take different and sometimes contradictory positions" on the standard's origin, and names three accounts that compete directly with James Q. Whitman's theological one: Anthony Morano's reading of it as "a prosecutorial innovation that had the effect of decreasing the burden of proof in criminal cases"; John H. Langbein's dating of it to "the mid-1780s as part of an effort to create procedural protections of the accused" — the reverse of Whitman's claim, since it makes the rule defendant-protective from the start; and Barbara Shapiro's location of its roots in "seventeenth century philosophy of reason, as an effort to find 'moral certainty.'" Against these, Whitman's account is summarized as tracing the standard to "the Middle Ages, originally conceived not for the protection of criminal accused, but rather for the 'souls of the jurors.'" The survey's own verdict declines to pick a winner, but it is not a verdict of four irreconcilable theories: Karnavas writes that "although the conclusions of scholars vary, there is a substantial overlap in details and the overall historical narrative," and that "the dispute focuses on interpretations and emphasis." The split this note records is therefore a split over which mechanism and which beneficiary the standard originally served — not a claim that the four accounts describe unrelated histories.

Three years later, a Judicature piece by federal judge Jon O. Newman restates Whitman's thesis and Posner's timing objection side by side without taking a position — a second, independent data point that as of the late 2010s the debate was still treated as open by working jurists citing the literature, not settled history. The honest field-reception picture is therefore "contested, with both critics and extenders" (see claim-whitman-reasonable-doubt-began-as-juror-soul-protection for Samuel Pillsbury's 2010 review extending Whitman's framing normatively), not "rejected" and not "consensus."