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Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr
Bending The Rules Of Evidence, Edward K. Cheng, G. Alexander Nunn, Julia Simon-Kerr
Faculty Scholarship
The evidence rules have well-established, standard textual meanings—meanings that evidence professors teach their law students every year. Yet, despite the rules’ clarity, courts misapply them across a wide array of cases: Judges allow past acts to bypass the propensity prohibition, squeeze hearsay into facially inapplicable exceptions, and poke holes in supposedly ironclad privileges. And that’s just the beginning.
The evidence literature sees these misapplications as mistakes by inept trial judges. This Article takes a very different view. These “mistakes” are often not mistakes at all, but rather instances in which courts are intentionally bending the rules of evidence. Codified evidentiary …
Childist Objections, Youthful Relevance, And Evidence Reconceived, Mae C. Quinn
Childist Objections, Youthful Relevance, And Evidence Reconceived, Mae C. Quinn
Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)
Evidence rules are written by and for adults. As a result, they largely lack the vantage point of youth and are rooted in arm’s-length assumptions about the lives and legal interests of young people. Moreover, because children have been mostly treated as evidentiary afterthoughts, they have been patched into the justice system and its procedures in a piecemeal fashion. Yet, to date, there has been no comprehensive scholarly critique of evidence principles and practices for failing to meaningfully account for youth. And the evidentiary intersection of youth and race has been almost entirely overlooked in legal scholarship. This Article, in …