Law Commons^™

Be Not The First By Whom The New Are Tried, Nor Yet The Last To Lay The Old Aside: Is The Present Sense Impression Exception To The Rule Against Hearsay The Law Of Pennsylvania?, Robert Berkley Harper

Scholarship

Pennsylvania has long been a common law jurisdiction as to the rules of evidence, but recently the courts have considered several modern views relating to the rules of evidence. One modern view of evidence considered by the state's supreme court is the present sense impression exception to the rule against hearsay. This exception was considered by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1974, but the decision left many questions as to the status and meaning of this new exception. The author traces the development of this new exception to the hearsay rule and makes recommendations as to clarifications that the …

On The Exclusivity Of The Hague Evidence Convention, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As the world grows smaller and nations become more interdependent, the likelihood that litigation will involve foreign property, parties, or activities increases tremendously. To prepare and conduct such litigation, the lawyer may need to obtain information "located" in a foreign jurisdiction: a person located abroad may know the information; documents located abroad may contain the information; or the information may describe conditions or property located abroad. The question of when relatively burdensome, internationally-approved methods of obtaining such information must be used thus becomes more and more important.

Consider a product liability suit for damages in the United States arising from …

Policing The Bases Of Modern Expert Testimony, Ronald L. Carlson

Scholarly Works

The expanding array of scientific (as well as some not-so-scientific) specialties available as sources for testimony raises hard questions. Will courts require that the witness' opinions be reasonably based upon trustworthy data? How far must judges inquire into the practice of other experts in the same field prior to allowing the trial witness to proffer an expert opinion? How much of the expert's supporting data will be received in evidence? This Essay addresses these and other important questions affecting the scope of modern expert testimony.

Do We Need A Calculus Of Weight To Understand Proof Beyond A Reasonable Doubt?, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

The commentary on a paper by L.J. Cohen, prepared for a symposium on probability and inference in the law of evidence, shows that the legal requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt can be understood simply as demanding a sufficiently high probability that the prosecution's narrative or story of the facts, which captures all the elements of the offense, is true. No separate measure of the "weight" of the totality of the evidence is required to understand the burden of persuasion. Any incompleteness in the evidence can be accounted for by a conditional probability that includes the presence of any …

Implied Hearsay, Ronald J. Bacigal

Law Faculty Publications

Lawyers sometimes exaggerate the significance of a single sentence or footnote in a court opinion. At other times a single phrase may turn out to be a time bomb which subsequently explodes with far reaching result:i. Court watchers thus spend considerable time trying to discern what is implied within the literal language of a court's opinion. It is no small irony that one of the latest implications in a Virginia Supreme Court decision relates to the implications contained within an out-of-court statement that cannot be literally defined as hearsay. A modification of the hearsay rule, or at least the hearsay …

An Introduction To Trial Law, J. Alexander Tanford

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Bite Mark Evidence, Paul C. Giannelli

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.