Law Commons^™

Saving An Old Friend From Extinction: A Proposal To Amend Rather Than To Abrogate The Ancient Documents Hearsay Exception, Peter Nicolas

Articles

This Essay critically assesses a pending, proposed amendment to the Federal Rules of Evidence—slated to take effect in December 2017—that would abrogate Federal Rule of Evidence 803(16), the hearsay exception for ancient documents. The proposed amendment was motivated largely by a fear that large quantities of potentially unreliable, stockpiled, electronically stored information (ESI) are approaching the threshold age for being deemed "ancient" and could thus be swept into evidence via the exception.

In Part I of this Essay, I provide an overview of the proposed amendment. In Part II, I contend that although the proposal is a well-intentioned effort to …

Federal Rule Of Evidence 403: Observations On The Nature Of Unfairly Prejudicial Evidence, Victor J. Gold

Washington Law Review

The object of this article is to identify what makes evidence unfairly prejudicial. The first part analyzes the language of and the policies behind Rule 403, and demonstrates that the courts' current ad hoc approach has frustrated those policies and prevented the rule from operating as written. Part II analyzes the nature of unfairly prejudicial evidence in light of the policies intended to be advanced by Rule 403. That part concludes that evidence may be considered unfairly prejudicial when it has a tendency to cause the trier of fact to commit an inferential error. The third part describes recent empirical …

The Federal Rules Of Evidence: A Model For Improved Evidentiary Decisionmaking In Washington, Robert H. Aronson

Washington Law Review

This article discusses the underlying reasons for establishing rules of evidence, defines two unavoidable conflicts encountered in attempting to effectuate the purposes for adopting such rules, suggests that the Federal Rules of Evidence help resolve these conflicts by adhering to several clearly enunciated rationales, and, finally, indicates how the Rules recognize and accommodate important new scientific and social insights on the admissibility of evidence.

Proposed Rule Of Evidence 609: Impeachment Of Criminal Defendants By Prior Convictions, D. Joseph Hurson

Washington Law Review

This comment describes current Washington law on the use of criminal convictions to impeach the testimony of criminal defendants and examines the factors which are relevant to the formation of a more acceptable rule. Adoption of the proposed rule would also affect the rules for impeaching nondefendant witnesses. Only a criminal defendant, however, is in jeopardy of actually being convicted as a result of a jury's misuse of evidence of prior convictions. Because the interests of the criminal defendant witness will be so drastically affected by the prior conviction rule which the Washington Supreme Court ultimately adopts, this comment will …

Elimination Of The Agency Fiction In The Vicarious Admissions Exception, Norman B. Page

Washington Law Review

This note will compare the Washington courts' application of the common law vicarious admissions exception to the broad rule embodied in Federal Rule 801(d)(2)(D). Furthermore, it will identify and analyze the policies upon which the vicarious admissions rule is grounded and will compare the effectiveness of the common law rule and the federal or "broad" rule in fulfilling those policies. It will demonstrate how, in focusing on the substantive law of agency rather than directly on those circumstances which tend to assure a statement's trustworthiness, both rules share a fundamental flaw and, as a result, accomplish only imprecisely the basic …

The Federal Rules Of Evidence: A Model For Improved Evidentiary Decisionmaking In Washington, Robert H. Aronson

Articles

This article discusses the underlying reasons for establishing rules of evidence, defines two unavoidable conflicts encountered in attempting to effectuate the purposes for adopting such rules, suggests that the Federal Rules of Evidence help resolve these conflicts by adhering to several clearly enunciated rationales, and, finally, indicates how the Rules recognize and accommodate important new scientific and social insights on the admissibility of evidence.