Law Commons^™

Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr

Faculty Scholarship

The evidence rules have well-established, standard textual meanings—meanings that evidence professors teach their law students every year. Yet, despite the rules’ clarity, courts misapply them across a wide array of cases: Judges allow past acts to bypass the propensity prohibition, squeeze hearsay into facially inapplicable exceptions, and poke holes in supposedly ironclad privileges. And that’s just the beginning.

The evidence literature sees these misapplications as mistakes by inept trial judges. This Article takes a very different view. These “mistakes” are often not mistakes at all, but rather instances in which courts are intentionally bending the rules of evidence. Codified evidentiary …

The Historical Origins Of The Privilege Against Self-Incrimination At Common Law, John H. Langbein

Michigan Law Review

This essay explains that the true origins of the common law privilege are to be found not in the high politics of the English revolutions, but in the rise of adversary criminal procedure at the end of the eighteenth century. The privilege against self-incrimination at common law was the work of defense counsel.

Part I of this essay discusses the several attributes of early modem criminal procedure that combined, until the end of the eighteenth century, to prevent the development of the common law privilege. Part II explains how prior scholarship went astray in locating the common law privilege against …

Taking The Fifth: Reconsidering The Origins Of The Constitutional Privilege Against Self-Incrimination, Eben Moglen

Michigan Law Review

The purpose of this essay is to cast doubt on two basic elements of the received historical wisdom concerning the privilege as it applies to British North America and the early United States. First, early American criminal procedure reflected less tenderness toward the silence of the criminal accused than the received wisdom has claimed. The system could more reasonably be said to have depended on self-incrimination than to have eschewed it, and this dependence increased rather than decreased during the provincial period for reasons intimately connected with the economic and social context of the criminal trial in colonial America.

Second, …

Due Process

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Alfred Hill's "Testimonial Privilege And Fair Trial", Peter Westen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

I have learned a great deal from "Testimonial Privilege and Fair Trial"-as I always do from Professor Hill's work. Indeed, he has changed my way of thinking in this area in several important respects. At the same time, I come to rather different conclusions than he regarding each of his three major topics. Part I of this article examines the problem of finding a "remedy" for testimonial privileges that violate a defendant's right to a fair trial. Part II discusses the problem of determining when a defendant is entitled to assert that the "right" has been violated. Finally, Part III …

Defendant's Right To Inspect Investigative Files Of Law Enforcement Agencies

Washington and Lee Law Review

No abstract provided.