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Even Better Than The Real Thing: How Courts Have Been Anything But Liberal In Finding Genuine Questions Raised As To The Authenticity Of Originals Under Rule 1003, Colin Miller

Colin Miller

In the common law days, parties seeking to prove the contents of documents were required to produce the original documents or account for their nonproduction. Pursuant to the Best Evidence Rule, if such parties neither produced the originals nor accounted for their nonproduction, courts prevented them from proving their contents through secondary evidence such as handwritten copies or testimony. With the invention of new technologies such as the process of xerography, however, states in the twentieth century began enacting exceptions to the Best Evidence Rule which allowed for the admission of duplicates created without manual transcription even when proponents could …