Bertrand Vilain is an antique dealer, independent researcher and nonfiction writer working at the intersection of archival investigation, legal history, and institutional analysis.
He is the author of two previously published books, and his research has been featured in a prime-time documentary broadcast on France 2, as well as in major French newspapers including Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Le Parisien.
He lived for several years in the United States, notably in Oklahoma and Texas, and is married to an American. This long-term personal and cultural immersion informs the book’s transatlantic perspective and its deliberate positioning for an English-speaking readership.
His work focuses on how judicial and administrative systems produce certainty—particularly when conclusions are built on unverified or untested assumptions rather than systematic verification.
In When Certainty Replaces Verification, the inquiry is conducted through the narrative figure of Albert Baker, an American judicial genealogist and professor of French. Baker is a constructed narrator, designed to function as a methodological lens rather than an autobiographical stand-in. This narrative device allows the book to maintain analytical distance and a strictly non-advocacy posture, while situating the investigation at the intersection of American and French legal cultures.
The book does not seek to revisit questions of guilt or innocence. Instead, it examines how a single negative assertion—“the deal never existed”—was able to close a century-old case without ever being systematically tested.