Law Commons^™

"Business On Trial: The True Story." Review Of Business On Trial: The Civil Jury And Corporate Responsibility, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

Jury trials are very much an affair of stories. Lawyers tell stories to juries. Evidence is more convincing when presented in story order. Jurors use stories to make sense of evidence. And litigants, particularly losing litigants, tell stories about juries. One of the favorite stories of losing business litigants, second only to the irrational jury story, is the Robin Hood story. Juries love to play Robin Hood, to steal from the rich (businesses and insurance companies) and to give to the poor (individual litigants, especially individual tort litigants). The storytellers see no mystery here. Jurors are "little guys," like the …

Proposed Amendments To Fed. R. Crim. P. 26: An Exchange: Remote Testimony, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Recently, the Supreme Court declined to pass on to Congress a proposed change to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 26 submitted to it by the Judicial Conference. In this Article, Professor Friedman addresses this proposal, which would allow for more extensive use of remote, video-based testimony at criminal trials. He agrees with the majority of the Court that the proposal raised serious problems under the Confrontation Clause. He also argues that a revised proposal, in addition to better protecting the confrontation rights of defendants, should include more definite quality standards, abandon its reliance on the definition of unavailability found in …

No Link: The Jury And The Origins Of The Confrontation Right And The Hearsay Rule, Richard D. Friedman

Book Chapters

The rule against hearsay has long been one of the most distinctive elements of the common law of evidence, and indeed— except for recent changes on the civil side in many jurisdictions— of the common law system of trial. Observers have long believed that the rule, like most of the other exclusionary rules of the common law of evidence, is "the child of the jury system". Though Edmund Morgan argued vigorously to the contrary, the received understanding is that the jury's inability to account satisfactorily for the defects of hearsay explains the rule. A famous, and perhaps seminal, expression of …

Confessions, Search And Seizure, And The Rehnquist Court, Yale Kamisar

Book Chapters

About the time William Rehnquist ascended to the Chief Justiceship of the United States, two events occurred that increased the likelihood that Miranda would enjoy a long life.

In Moran v. Burbine, a six to three majority held that a confession preceded by an otherwise valid waiver of a suspect's Miranda rights should not be excluded either (1) because the police misled an inquiring attorney when they told her they were not going to question the suspect she called about or (2) because the police failed to inform the suspect of the attorney's efforts to reach him.

Although Burbine has …

Dial-In Testimony, Richard D. Friedman, Bridget Mary Mccormack

Articles

For several hundred years, one of the great glories of the common law system of criminal justice has been the requirement that prosecution witnesses give their testimony in the presence of the accused" face to face," in the time-honored phrase-under oath, subject to cross-examination, and, unless unfeasible, in open court. In the United States, this principle is enshrined in the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment, which provides that "[i]n all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to be confronted with the witnesses against him." But now a new way is developing for witnesses for the prosecution …

The Conundrum Of Children, Confrontation, And Hearsay, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The adjudication of child abuse claims poses an excruciatingly difficult conundrum. The crime is a terrible one, but false convictions are abhorrent. Often the evidence does not support a finding of guilt or innocence with sufficient clarity to allow a decision free of gnawing doubt. In many cases, a large part of the problem is that the prosecution's case depends critically on the statement or testimony of a young child. Even with respect to adult witnesses, the law of hearsay and confrontation is very perplexing, as anyone who has studied American evidentiary law and read Supreme Court opinions on the …

The Writings Of John Barker Waite And Thomas Davies On The Search And Seizure Exclusionary Rule, Yale Kamisar

Articles

After browsing through many volumes of the Michigan Law Review, searching for the article I would discuss on the occasion of the law review's 100th anniversary, I wound up with two "finalists": a 1955 article by Professor John Barker Waite on the law of arrest search and seizure (on further reflection, four Michigan Law Review commentaries on the general subject written by Waite between 1933 and 1955)' and a monumental 200-page article (surely one of the longest articles ever to appear in the Michigan Law Review) by Thomas Davies on the "original Fourth Amendment. 2