Law Commons^™

Idealizing Science And Demonizing Experts: An Intellectual History Of Expert Evidence, Jennifer L. Mnookin

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Youngblood Success Stories: Overcoming The "Bad Faith" Destruction Of Evidence Standard, Teresa N. Chen

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

The (Futile) Search For A Common Law Right Of Confrontation: Beyond Brasier's Irrelevance To (Perhaps) Relevant American Cases, Randolph N. Jonakait

Articles & Chapters

After Crawford v. Washington asserted that the Confrontation Clause constitutionalized the common law right of confrontation, cases have been suggested that illustrate that right. This short essay considers whether the 1779 English case Rex v. Brasier is such a decision, as some contend. The essay concludes that Brasier says nothing about the right of confrontation and points to a comparable framing-era, American case that indicates that general rules about hearsay and confrontation were not at issue. The essay maintains that if the historical understandings of the right of confrontation and hearsay are to control the Confrontation Clause, then framing-era, American …

Nontestimonial Hearsay After Crawford, Davis And Bockting, Laird Kirkpatrick

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The Sixth Amendment of the United States Constitution bars some hearsay from being introduced against criminal defendants on the ground that it would violate their right to confront the witnesses against them. In a recent series of decisions - Crawford, Davis and Bockting - the U.S. Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of the Confrontation Clause by interpreting it to govern only testimonial hearsay. This article criticizes the analysis and process by which the Court reached its conclusion that the Confrontation Clause has no application to nontestimonial hearsay and raises questions of history and policy about the possible dangers of …

Poetic (In)Justice? Rap Music Lyrics As Art, Life, And Criminal Evidence, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

Courts routinely admit defendant-authored rap music lyrics as substantive evidence in the adjudication of criminal cases. In doing so, courts fail to recognize that rap music lyrics are art. Rather, judges view the interpretation of rap music lyrics as a subject of common knowledge, interpret the defendant's lyrics literally, and characterize lyrics as autobiographical depictions of actual events. In making admissibility decisions, courts must give consideration to the social constraints and artistic conventions impacting the composition and interpretation of rap music lyrics. More particularly, they must understand the commercialized nature of the rap music industry, artist claims of authenticity, and …

Doctrinal Issues In Evidence And Proof, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The word evidence ordinarily means the statements, events, items, or sensory perceptions that suggest the existence or nonexistence of, or truth or falsity of, another fact. Thus, one may say, “hoofbeats are evidence a horse may be passing.” Proof is similar in meaning but may connote more certainty.

Evidence can also mean the study of either (1) how people make such inferences (especially when conjoined with the word proof) or (2) how law regulates information admissibility in the judicial context. Evidence in the latter sense is the name of a standard law school course in common law countries and a …

Two Faces Of Progress: Fairness And Flexibility In Arbitral Procedure, William W. Park

Faculty Scholarship

Arranged in pairs, the biographies in Plutarch's Parallel Lives contrast great statesmen, orators and soldiers from the ancient Roman and Greek worlds.1 Cicero, the Roman orator, finds himself juxtaposed with his Greek counterpart, Demosthenes. The Roman general Caesar stands compared with the Hellenic military genius of Alexander. And so on.

On The Fortieth Anniversary Of The Miranda Case: Why We Needed It, How We Got It--And What Happened To It, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Last year (the year I gave the talk on which this article is based) marked the fortieth anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona,' one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-Supreme Court cases in American history. It is difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate Miranda without looking back at the test for the admissibility of confessions that preceded it.

The Principled Exception And The Forgotten Criterion, Steve Coughlan

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The principled exception to the hearsay rule is routinely described as being settled by the "twin criteria" of necessity and reliability. In fact a third criterion is also — or at least ought to be — at play: that admitting the evidence through hearsay would not undermine any other rule of evidence. The Court has made reference to this third criterion in the past, but it has largely been ignored in both Supreme Court and lower court decisions. The recent judgement in Couture depends in a limited way on that question, and so it marks an opportunity to articulate the …

After Thirty Years, Is It Time To Change The Vehicle Inventory Search Doctrine?, Nicholas B. Stampfli

Seattle University Law Review

Part II of this Comment will describe the inventory search as it has developed in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in order to provide background and understanding of the procedure as it stands today. Part III will address the difficulties in applying the Supreme Court's approach by comparing the differences in police department policies. Part IV will then closely examine Washington's somewhat laudable approach to inventory searches, the limits the state has placed on the scope of inventory searches, and the steps the state has taken to impose a consent requirement. Last, Part V will suggest much needed reforms for Washington …

Symposium Foreward: Daubert, Innocence, And The Future Of Forensic Science, Jane Moriarty

Jane Campbell Moriarty

The years since Daubert have not been kind to those seeking to challenge prosecutorial expert evidence, as many of the Symposium authors recognize. After two decades of trying to convince courts that there is no empirical basis for handwriting identification testimony declaring a match between two samples, Michael Risinger claims to be packing his bags and leaving the island until there is a more conducive climate for examining the reliability problems.

If You (Re)Build It They Will Come: Contracts To Remake The Rules Of Litigation In Arbitration's Image, Henry S. Noyes

Henry S. Noyes

The Supreme Court describes the right to trial by jury in a civil action as a "basic and fundamental" right that is "sacred to the citizen" and therefore "should be jealously guarded by the court." But parties to a contract may agree that, in the event a dispute arises, they waive their right to a jury. If this dispute resolution right - which is fundamental, constitutional, and set forth in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure - may be used as a bargaining chip, are there any limits on parties' ability to modify the rules of litigation in their ex …

Magistrates’ Examinations, Police Interrogations, And Miranda—Like Warnings In The Nineteenth Century, Wesley M. Oliver

Wesley M Oliver

The New York legislature in the early-nineteenth century began to require interrogators to warn suspects of their right to silence and counsel. The Warren Court, in Miranda v. Arizona, did not invent the language of the warnings; rather, it resurrected the warnings that were no longer given in New York after the latter half of the nineteenth century. The confessions rule, a judicially created rule of evidence much like the modern voluntariness rule, excluded many statements if any threat or inducement was made to the suspect. Courts in the early-nineteenth century, however, were willing to accept confessions notwithstanding an improper …

Why A Conviction Should Not Be Based On A Single Piece Of Evidence: A Proposal For Reform, Boaz Sangero, Mordechai Halpert

Prof. Boaz Sangero

This article illustrates a serious flaw in the conventional legal approach enabling a conviction based solely on one piece of evidence. This flaw derives from a cognitive illusion referred to as “the fallacy of the transposed conditional.” People might assume a low error rate in evidence only leads to a small percentage of wrongful convictions. We show that, counterintuitively, even a very low error rate might lead to a wrongful conviction in most cases where the conviction is based on a single piece of evidence. Case law has indicated some awareness of this fallacy, primarily when considering the random match …

A Liberal Challenge To Behavioral Economics: The Case Of Probability, Alex Stein

Alex Stein

THE "BLUE CAB" EXPERIMENT: ARE LAY FACT-FINDERS "PROBABILISTICALLY CHALLENGED"? No, they are not. The experiment is methodologically deficient, as is the behavioral economics' assumption that one needs to conceptualize probabilities in the Pascalian way in order to be rational.

Mediating Rules In Criminal Law, Alex Stein, Richard A. Bierschbach

Alex Stein

This Article challenges the conventional divide between substantive criminal law theory, on the one hand, and evidence law, on the other, by exposing an important and unrecognized function of evidence rules in criminal law. Throughout the criminal law, special rules of evidence work to mediate conflicts between criminal law’s deterrence and retributivist goals. They do this by skewing errors in the actual application of the substantive criminal law to favor whichever theory has been disfavored by the substantive rule itself. The mediating potential of evidentiary rules is particularly strong in criminal law because the substantive law’s dominant animating theories—deterrence and …