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Modifying The Kentucky Rules Of Evidence—A Separation Of Powers Issue, Robert G. Lawson
Modifying The Kentucky Rules Of Evidence—A Separation Of Powers Issue, Robert G. Lawson
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
How do you modify laws that simultaneously exist as statutes and rules of court? For reasons that are described elsewhere and need not be repeated here, the Kentucky Rules of Evidence (K.R.E.) came into existence through concurrent enactment by the General Assembly and Kentucky Supreme Court and thus are endowed with all the attributes of both statutes and rules of court. So, how do you change them when the inevitable need to do so arises, a question made both interesting and difficult by the fact that there is no institutional mechanism for concurrent lawmaking by the General Assembly and supreme …
Interpretation Of The Kentucky Rules Of Evidence—What Happened To The Common Law?, Robert G. Lawson
Interpretation Of The Kentucky Rules Of Evidence—What Happened To The Common Law?, Robert G. Lawson
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
The Kentucky Rules of Evidence, which became effective on July 1, 1992, dramatically transformed the method by which lawyers and judges address evidence issues. Before the adoption of the Rules, the law of evidence consisted mostly of a vast collection of common law rulings, accumulated over two centuries and inaccessible to lawyers and judges for all practical purposes. In addressing an evidence issue, participants had to first deal with the problem of "finding" the law-distilling from a morass of conflicting common law precedents the ones applicable to the issue at hand, a task regularly producing contention rather than agreement and, …
"I Vote This Way Because I'M Wrong": The Supreme Court Justice As Epimenides, John M. Rogers
"I Vote This Way Because I'M Wrong": The Supreme Court Justice As Epimenides, John M. Rogers
Law Faculty Scholarly Articles
Possibly the most unsettling phenomenon in the Supreme Court's 1988 term was Justice White's decision to vote contrary to his own exhaustively stated reasoning in Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co. His unexplained decision to vote against the result of his own analysis lends support to those who argue that law, or at least constitutional law, is fundamentally indeterminate. Proponents of the indeterminacy argument sometimes base their position on the allegedly inescapable inconsistency of decisions made by a multi-member court. There is an answer to the inconsistency argument, but it founders if justices sometimes vote, without explanation, on the basis of …