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Full-Text Articles in Law

"Electronic Fingerprints": Doing Away With The Conception Of Computer-Generated Records As Hearsay, Adam Wolfson Oct 2005

"Electronic Fingerprints": Doing Away With The Conception Of Computer-Generated Records As Hearsay, Adam Wolfson

Michigan Law Review

One night, in the hours just before daybreak, the computer servers at Acme Corporation's headquarters quietly hum in the silence of the office's darkened hallways. Suddenly, they waken to life and begin haphazardly sifting through their files. Several states away, a hacker sits in his room, searching through the mainframe via an internet connection. His attack is quick-lasting only a short five minutes-but the evidence of invasion is apparent to Acme's IT employees when they come in to work the next morning. Nearly a year later, federal prosecutors bring suit in the federal district court against the person they believe …


Bayes' Law, Sequential Uncertainties, And Evidence Of Causation In Toxic Tort Cases, Neal C. Stout, Peter A. Valberg Jul 2005

Bayes' Law, Sequential Uncertainties, And Evidence Of Causation In Toxic Tort Cases, Neal C. Stout, Peter A. Valberg

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Judges are the gatekeepers of evidence. Arguably, the most difficult duty for a judicial gatekeeper is to screen the reliability of expert opinions in scientific fields such as medicine that are beyond the ken of most judges. Yet, judges have a duty to scrutinize such expert opinion evidence to determine its reliability and admissibility. In toxic tort cases, the issue of causation-whether the alleged exposures actually caused the plaintiffs injury-is nearly always the central dispute, and determining admissibility of expert causation opinion is a daunting challenge for most judges. We present a comprehensive review of the courts' struggles with the …


Crawford Surprises: Mostly Unpleasant, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2005

Crawford Surprises: Mostly Unpleasant, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Crawford v. Washington should not have been surprising. The Confrontation Clause guarantees a criminal defendant the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." The doctrine of Ohio v. Roberts, treating the clause as a general proscription against the admission of hearsay-except hearsay that fits within a "firmly rooted" exception or is otherwise deemed reliable-had so little to do with the constitutional text, or with the history or principle behind it, that eventually it was bound to be discarded. And the appeal of a testimonial approach to the clause seemed sufficiently strong to yield high hopes that ultimately the …


Is Poetry A War Crime? Reckoning For Radovan Karadzic The Poet-Warrior, Jay Surdukowski Jan 2005

Is Poetry A War Crime? Reckoning For Radovan Karadzic The Poet-Warrior, Jay Surdukowski

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Note will suggest that the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) can use Karadzic's texts and affectations to warrior poetry in the pretrial brief and in admitted evidence, if and when Karadzic ultimately appears for trial. The violent nationalism of radio broadcasts, political journals, speeches, interviews, and manifestos have been fair game for the Office of the Prosecutor to make their cases in the last decade in both the Yugoslavia and Rwanda Tribunals. Why should poetry, perhaps the most powerful maker of myth and in the Yugoslavia context, a great mover …


Apology Within A Moral Dialectic: A Reply To Professor Robbennolt, Lee Taft Jan 2005

Apology Within A Moral Dialectic: A Reply To Professor Robbennolt, Lee Taft

Michigan Law Review

Over the last several years, much has been written about the role of apology in facilitating the resolution of legal disputes. Within this body of work a debate has developed among legal scholars, practitioners, and legislators. Under traditional rules of evidence an apology which acknowledged fault would enter evidence as an admission against interest. Now there is a movement to legislatively "protect" apologies from the effects of the traditional rule in order to facilitate apology without evidentiary encumbrance. Scholars who have argued in favor of the relaxation of the traditional rule have largely relied on anecdotal evidence to support their …


Grappling With The Meaning Of 'Testimonial', Richard D. Friedman Jan 2005

Grappling With The Meaning Of 'Testimonial', Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Crawford v. Washington, has adopted a testimonial approach to the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. Under this approach, a statement that is deemed to be testimonial in nature may not be introduced at trial against an accused unless he has had an opportunity to cross-examine the person who made the statement and that person is unavailable to testify at trial. If a statement is not deemed to be testimonial, then the Confrontation Clause poses little if any obstacle to its admission.2 A great deal therefore now rides on the meaning of the word "testimonial."


Confrontation After Crawford, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2005

Confrontation After Crawford, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

The following edit excerpt, drawn from "The Confrontation Clause Re-Rooted and Transformed," 2003-04 Cato Supreme Court Review 439 (2004), by Law School Professor Richard D. Friedman, discusses the impact, effects, and questions generated by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v. Washington last year that a defendant is entitled to confront and cross-examine any testimonial statement presented against him. In Crawford, the defendant, charged with attacking another man with a knife, contested the trial court's admission of a tape-recorded statement his wife made to police without giving him the opportunity to cross-examine. The tiral court admitted the statement, and …