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Full-Text Articles in Law
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 …
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 Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit
The Character Of Jury Exclusion, Anna Offit
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
Encounters with the legal system are unevenly distributed throughout the American population, with Black and poor citizens targeted as disparate subjects of surveillance, arrest, and criminal conviction. At the same time, these encounters, as well as a stated belief in the unfairness of the legal system, are commonly viewed as legitimate grounds for excusal from jury service. This follows from an understanding of juror bias that assumes that people with negative experiences with legal actors—police and prosecutors, for example—will be less likely to trust and more likely to discount the contributions of those actors within the context of the jury …
An Objective-Chance Exception To The Rule Against Character Evidence, Hillel J. Bavli
An Objective-Chance Exception To The Rule Against Character Evidence, Hillel J. Bavli
Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters
A central principle of U.S. law is that individuals should be judged in court based on their actions and not on their character. Rule 404 of the Federal Rules of Evidence therefore prohibits evidence of an individual’s previous acts to prove that the individual acted in accordance with a certain character or propensity. But courts regularly deviate from or altogether ignore this rule, resulting in arbitrariness and judgments based on an individual's prior acts rather than on evidence regarding the events at issue in a case.
In this Article, I argue that at the center of the unpredictability surrounding the …