Posner's 2008 review accepts Whitman's medieval theological history but disputes it as the cause of the 18th-century reasonable-doubt codification, on timing grounds

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Reviewing James Q. Whitman's The Origins of Reasonable Doubt in The New Republic, federal appellate judge and legal scholar Richard A. Posner grants the book's archival core: Whitman "makes a convincing case that the desire to give moral comfort to judges and others involved in deciding whether to impose blood punishments influenced the development of criminal procedure in the middle ages." Posner's objection is not to the medieval theological history but to the causal chain Whitman draws from it to the 18th-century Anglo-American "beyond reasonable doubt" formula. The Fourth Lateran Council abolished trial by ordeal in 1215; the reasonable-doubt standard did not crystallize until the 1780s. As Posner puts it, "five and a half centuries intervened between the rejection of the ordeal by the Fourth Lateran Council and the emergence of the rule," and by the 1780s the conditions Whitman's mechanism requires had already faded — "fear of damnation declined; blood punishments declined with the rise of transportation as an alternative to execution and mutilation." Posner further disputes Whitman's reading of the unanimity requirement as diffusing individual jurors' moral responsibility, arguing the reverse: "the requirement empowers each juror to prevent a guilty verdict, and thus makes each member of a jury that is unanimous to convict complicit in that decision."

This is a named, mechanism-level rebuttal from a prominent legal scholar, not a vague dismissal, and it is the sharpest documented critique of claim-whitman-reasonable-doubt-began-as-juror-soul-protection's causal claim found to date — see claim-legal-historians-remain-split-among-four-competing-origin-accounts-for-reasonable-doubts-origin for how this fits the wider field split.