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Damaška: Evidence Law Adrift. A Book Review, Richard O. Lempert Jan 1998

Damaška: Evidence Law Adrift. A Book Review, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

Let me state my biases at the start. I am a great fan of Professor Damaska and have been ever since I read his first book, The Faces of Justice and State Authority. Professor Damaska's most recent book, Evidence Law Adrift, adds to my admiration. In Evidence Law Adrift Professor Dama~ka examines Continental and Anglo-American trial procedures and argues that changes in the way Anglo-American courts resolve cases, especially the marginalization of the jury trial, strip common law evidence doctrine of its theoretical base and place it in danger of becoming an intellectual curiosity confined, in Professor Damaska's words, "to …


Anchors And Flotsam: Is Evidence Law 'Adrift'?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1998

Anchors And Flotsam: Is Evidence Law 'Adrift'?, Richard D. Friedman

Reviews

Difference, as well as distance, yields perspective. A comparison of legal systems may search for common underlying principles, or for lessons that one system might learn from another. But it may also be aimed primarily at illuminating one system by light shed from another. This is the aim of Evidence Law Adrift, Mirjan Damagka's elegant study of the common law system of evidence, and he is ideally suited for the task. Born and schooled in Continental Europe, he has lived and taught in the United States for twenty-five years. His relation to the common law system of evidence is, I …


Law In The Backwaters: A Comment Of Mirjan Damaška's Evidence Law Adrift, Samuel R. Gross Jan 1998

Law In The Backwaters: A Comment Of Mirjan Damaška's Evidence Law Adrift, Samuel R. Gross

Reviews

The most problematic part of Professor Mirjan Damaška's fine book is the title.' Professor Damaška does an excellent job of situating American evidence law in the procedural context in which American trials occur. He identifies three major procedural elements. First, juries are traditionally cited as the primary or sole explanation for our extensive set of exclusionary rules, which are said to express mistrust of lay adjudicators. Professor Damaška points out as well that lay juries permit a divided court, with a professional judge who has exclusive control over "questions of law," and that this division is necessary for the operation …


Assessing Evidence, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1996

Assessing Evidence, Richard D. Friedman

Reviews

David A. Schum's Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning, 2 C.G.G. Aitken's Statistics and the Evaluation of Evidence for Forensic Scientists,3 and Bernard Robertson and G.A. Vignaux's Interpreting Evidence: Evaluating Forensic Science in the Courtroom4 all have something to tell us about how to use and evaluate evidence. Although the books are addressed to different primary audiences5 and their authors come from a variety of disciplines and from distant points of the English-speaking world,6 all three help draw the connection between underlying theory and presentation in the courtroom. Though Schum uses numerous examples from litigation and discusses the legal literature of …


Still Photographs In The Flow Of Time, Richard D. Friedman Jan 1995

Still Photographs In The Flow Of Time, Richard D. Friedman

Reviews

Rarely is an image of the actual moment of death captured and preserved. When it is, as in the famous photographs of President John F Kennedy's assassination or of the summary execution of a Viet Cong officer by a South Vietnamese police chief,4 it is haunting. Even photographs of the moment before sudden death have great power-whether death is totally unexpected (as in a photograph of Luis Donaldo Colosio campaigning for the presidency of Mexico just before his assassination'), planned (as in a photograph of a man bound in an electric chair awaiting execution6 ), or in doubt and anticipated …


Documents And Their Scientific Examination, Victor H. Lane Jan 1922

Documents And Their Scientific Examination, Victor H. Lane

Reviews

Professor Lane's short review of a "little work" that touches on "the composition and behavior of inks, pencil pigments, sealing wax, and other writing materials in connection with their use upon documents." Lane feels that "A study such as this is of material importance in presenting expert evidence in civil and criminal cases..."