Law Commons^™

Florida's Request For Admission Rule: 150 Years On The Road To Inconsistency, Ineffectiveness And Appellate Nullification, Mitchell J. Frank

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Courtroom Technology: For Trial Lawyers The Future Is Now, Fredric I. Lederer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Valuation Averaging: A New Procedure For Resolving Valuation Disputes, Keith Sharfman

Rutgers Law School (Newark) Faculty Papers

In this Article, Professor Sharfman addresses the problem of "discretionary valuation": that courts resolve valuation disputes arbitrarily and unpredictably, thus harming litigants and society. As a solution, he proposes the enactment of "valuation averaging," a new procedure for resolving valuation disputes modeled on the algorithmic valuation processes often agreed to by sophisticated private firms in advance of any dispute. He argues that by replacing the discretion of judges and juries with a mechanical valuation process, valuation averaging would cause litigants to introduce more plausible and conciliatory valuations into evidence and thereby reduce the cost of valuation litigation and increase the …

Daubert & Danger: The "Fit" Of Expert Predictions In Civil Commitments, Alex Scherr

Scholarly Works

The opinions of experts in prediction in civil commitment hearings should help the courts, but over thirty years of commentary, judicial opinion, and scientific review argue that predictions of danger lack scientific rigor. The United States Supreme Court has commented regularly on the uncertainty of predictive science. The American Psychiatric Association has argued to the Court that "[t]he professional literature uniformly establishes that such predictions are fundamentally of very low reliability." Scientific studies indicate that some predictions do little better than chance or lay speculation, and even the best predictions leave substantial room for error about individual cases. The sharpest …

Virtual Cross-Examination: The Art Of Impeaching Hearsay, John G. Douglass

Law Faculty Publications

Trial lawyers and judges are quite accustomed to courtroom battles over the admissibility of hearsay. But relatively few have much experience at challenging the credibility of hearsay. Once hearsay is admitted in evidence, even the ablest advocates typically proceed as if the hearsay battle were over, at least until the appeal. Few lawyers take advantage of the opportunities available to impeach the hearsay declarant. Consider the perspective of one experienced trial judge: I sometimes wonder at what seems to me the passing up of golden opportunities by the able advocate. Foremost among these lost opportunities is the virtual total neglect …

Wrongful Convictions And The Accuracy Of The Criminal Justice System, H. Patrick Furman

Publications

No abstract provided.

Narrative Relevance, Imagined Juries, And A Supreme Court Inspired Agenda For Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This paper has its roots in Old Chief v. United States, a case the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1997. I will begin by describing this case; then comment on its implications for the Supreme Court’s conception of the jury, and conclude by examining the agenda one may draw from it for empirical jury research. Old Chief arose when Johnny Lynn Old Chief was charged not only with assault with a dangerous weapon and using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, but also with violating a law that forbids convicted felons from possessing …

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 …

Confidentiality, Privilege And Rule 408: The Protection Of Mediation Proceedings In Federal Court, Charles W. Ehrhardt

Scholarly Publications

No abstract provided.

Narrative Relevance, Imagined Juries, And A Supreme Court Inspired Agenda For Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This paper has its roots in Old Chief v. United States, a case the Supreme Court of the United States decided in 1997. I will begin by describing this case; then comment on its implications for the Supreme Court's conception of the jury, and conclude by examining the agenda one may draw from it for empirical jury research. Old Chief arose when Johnny Lynn Old Chief was charged not only with assault with a dangerous weapon and using a firearm in the commission of a crime of violence, but also with violating a law that precludes convicted felons from possessing …

Attorney-Client Privilege When The Client Is A Public Official: Litigating The Opening Act Of The Impeachment Drama, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The divided panel decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in /n re Lindsey, 158 F.3d 1263 (D.C. Cir.), cert. denied, 119 S. Ct. 466 (1998), represented a dramatic shift in that court's thinking on the question whether the attorney-client privilege protects what a government official says to his agency's counsel in confidence. Although the court of appeals in at least four previous decisions had held that a government agency client holds the same privilege any other client would under like circumstances to communicate with counsel in private, the Lindsey court took a quite different view.

Some Thoughts On The Evidentiary Aspects Of Technologically Produced Or Presented Evidence, Fredric I. Lederer

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

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, …

Jaffee V. Redmond: Towards Recognition Of A Federal Counselor-Battered Woman Privilege, Fernando Laguarda, Michael B. Bressman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

An Introduction To Trial Law, J. Alexander Tanford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

United States V. Leon, Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.

Bose Corp. V. Consumers Union Of United States, Inc., Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.

Brewer V. Williams, Massiah And Miranda: What Is 'Interrogation'? When Does It Matter?, Yale Kamisar

Articles

On Christmas Eve, 1968, a ten-year-old girl, Pamela Powers, disappeared while with her family in Des Moines, Iowa.2 Defendant Williams, an escapee from a mental institution and a deeply religious person, 3 was suspected of murdering her, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.4 Williams telephoned a Des Moines lawyer, McKnight, and on his advice surrendered himself to the Davenport, Iowa, police.5 Captain Learning and another Des Moines police officer arranged to drive the 160 miles to Davenport, pick up Williams, and return him directly to Des Moines. 6 Both the trial court 7 and the federal district court8 …

The Second Circuit And The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The most significant development in federal trial procedure in recent years has been the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence, effective July 1, 1975. In the intervening two years since the Rules became effective, the courts of the Second Circuit have bad occasion to make several illuminating applications of and references to them.

An examination of some of these decisions provides insight into the kinds of questions that are coming up not only in the Second Circuit, but around the country, and the kinds of answers that are being given. It is not the bizarre or unusual case that …

Oregon V. Hass, Lewis F. Powell Jr.

Supreme Court Case Files

No abstract provided.

Easy Cases, Bad Law, And Burdens Of Proof, Roger B. Dworkin

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.