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Full-Text Articles in Law
Character Evidence As A Conduit For Implicit Bias, Hillel J. Bavli
Character Evidence As A Conduit For Implicit Bias, Hillel J. Bavli
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
The Federal Rules of Evidence purport to prohibit character evidence, or evidence regarding a defendant’s past bad acts or propensities offered to suggest that the defendant acted in accordance with a certain character trait on the occasion in question. However, courts regularly admit character evidence through an expanding set of legislative and judicial exceptions that have all but swallowed the rule. In the usual narrative, character evidence is problematic because jurors place excessive weight on it or punish the defendant for past behavior. Lawmakers rely on this narrative when they create exceptions. However, this account arguably misses a highly troublesome …
The Incongruence Principle Of Evidence, Hillel Bavli
The Incongruence Principle Of Evidence, Hillel Bavli
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Evidence law assumes that the meaning and value of information at trial is equal to the meaning and value of the same information in the real world. This premise underlies evidence policy, judicial applications of evidence law, and instructions to jurors for evaluating evidence. However, it is incorrect, and the law’s failure to recognize this hinders its aims of accuracy and equality.
In this article, I draw on fields outside of law - including Bayesian inference and cognitive psychology - to develop a model of evidence that describes how jurors combine new evidence with prior beliefs (or “priors”) to make …