Evidence Commons^™

Nonproduction Of Witnesses As Deliberative Evidence, James E. Beaver

Seattle University Law Review

The chief practical difficulty today, as always, lies in the particular application of a mass of evidentiary rules, in determining the bearing of various principles upon a given evidentiary issue of fact here and now. Nowhere has this situation continued truer than with reference to rules about evidentiary spoliation. "Indeed, after reading all there is on the subject in a recent voluminous text-book, one may well be bewildered, owing to the collection of crude, inadvertent and contradictory material."' As a result, the "request to charge which more frequently than any other is made in improper form is that dealing …