Evidence Commons^™

Limites A La Vigencia Del Principio Contradictorio En Los Juicios De Familia / Limits To The Adversarial Ideal In The Family Courts, Claudio Fuentes Maureira

Claudio Fuentes Maureira

The relevance of the adversarial ideal in the design of judicial proceedings is due to two major ideas: the right to a proper defence for the parties and the important role that the parties perform during the questioning and the control of the other party’s case. Once the relevance of the adversarial ideal is acknowledged, one could ask if this ideal is properly welcomed under the family procedure stated in the law. I propose that in order to answer this question properly, it is pertinent to use some sort of instrument to measure the amount of the adversarialness that the …

Informe De Funcionamiento De Los Tribunales De Familia De Santiago / Report On The Family Courts Of Santiago City, Claudio Fuentes Maureira, Felipe Marín Verdugo, Erick Rios Leiva

Claudio Fuentes Maureira

In October 2005, the Chilean government launched the new family courts. The new tribunals were the second major judicial reform that Chile’s executive power supported and it was a huge failure. The system collapsed after a couple of months, and in the beginning of the 2006, the executive branch called for a group of academics and experts to elaborate some kind of response.

After years of problems the authorities arrived at identifying the main problems, and because of that in September 2008 a new bill was enacted, containing modifications to the family law system. Also, the Supreme Court of Chile …

La Declaración De La Parte Como Medio De Prueba, Felipe Marín Verdugo

Felipe Marín Verdugo

Chilean Family and Labor procedures went from a written procedure to a hearing-based procedure, but judges are still "thinking" within the written procedure scope. This paper identifies one of the consequences of this approach: they are wrongly excluding parties as witnesses. The paper will argue againt this practice.

Hearings, Mark Spottswood

Faculty Working Papers

This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …

New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson

Michigan Law Review

Pleading in federal court has a new narrative. The old narrative was one of notice, with the goal of broad access to the civil justice system. New Pleading, after the landmark Supreme Court cases of Twombly and Iqbal, is focused on factual sufficiency, with the purpose of screening out meritless cases that otherwise might impose discovery costs on defendants. The problem with New Pleading is that factual insufficiency often is a poor proxy for meritlessness. Some plaintifs lack sufficient factual knowledge of the elements of their claims not because the claims lack merit but because the information they need is …

Let My Love Open The Door: The Case For Extending Marital Privileges To Unmarried Cohabitants, Julia Cardozo

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

The Pleading Problem In Antitrust Cases And Beyond, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In its Twombly decision the Supreme Court held that an antitrust complaint failed because its allegations did not include enough “factual matter” to justify proceeding to discovery. Two years later the Court extended this new pleading standard to federal complaints generally. Twombly’s broad language has led to a broad rewriting of federal pleading doctrine.

Naked market division conspiracies such as the one pled in Twombly must be kept secret because antitrust enforcers will prosecute them when they are detected. This inherent secrecy, which the Supreme Court did not discuss, has dire consequences for pleading if too much factual specificity …

An Unsettling Outcome: Why The Florida Supreme Court Was Wrong To Ban All Settlement Evidence In Saleeby V Rocky Elson Construction, Inc., 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009), Michael L. Seigel, Robert J. Hauser, Allison D. Sirica

UF Law Faculty Publications

It is rare that a court as sophisticated as the Florida Supreme Court casually makes a fundamental mistake in an important area of the law. Unfortunately, Saleeby v. Rocky Elson Construction, Inc., 3 So. 3d 1078 (Fla. 2009) represents one of these unusual instances. The Court was faced with a simple question: may evidence pertaining to a prior settlement be offered at trial when it is relevant to something other than liability or the invalidity or amount of the pending claim. The universal answer under both federal law and the law of other states is yes, as long as …

Hearings, Mark Spottswood

Mark Spottswood

This article explores a constantly recurring procedural question: When is fact-finding improved by a live hearing, and when would it be better to rely on a written record? Unfortunately, when judges, lawyers, and rulemakers consider this issue, they are led astray by the widely shared—but false—assumption that a judge can best determine issues of credibility by viewing the demeanor of witnesses while they are testifying. In fact, a large body of scientific evidence indicates that judges are more likely to be deceived by lying or mistaken witnesses when observing their testimony in person than if the judges were to review …

Procedural Adequacy, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

Elizabeth Chamblee Burch

This short piece responds to Jay Tidmarsh’s article, Rethinking Adequacy of Representation, 87 Texas Law Review 1137 (2009). I explore Professor Tidmarsh’s proposed “do no harm” approach to adequate representation in class actions from a procedural legitimacy perspective. I begin by considering the assumption underlying his alternative, namely that in any given class action both attorneys and class representatives tend to act as self-interested homo economicus and we must therefore tailor the adequacy requirement to curb self-interest only in so far as it makes class members worse off than they would be with individual litigation. Adopting the “do no harm” …

Régimen De Prisión Preventiva En América Latina: La Pena Anticipada, La Lógica Cautelar Y La Contrarreforma / Pre-Trial Detention Regime In Latin America: The Pre-Trial Punishment, Flight Risk And The Counter Reform, Claudio Fuentes Maureira

Claudio Fuentes Maureira

One of the main reasons that justified the criminal procedure reform in Latin America was the possibility to overcome and changed different practices that were very problematic. One of these complex situations was the excessive use of pre-trial detention in the context of criminal investigations; in particular, the abuse of this institution had a dangerous outcome when it comes to the protection of the human rights of the detainees.

From the mid 90’s onwards, most of the Latin American countries started a reform of their criminal institutions and proceedings. A considerable portion of the legal framework was heavily modified in …

Evidentiary Issues In The New York City Housing Court, Gerald Lebovits

Hon. Gerald Lebovits