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Full-Text Articles in Law
What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns
What Will We Lose If The Trial Vanishes?, Robert P. Burns
Faculty Working Papers
The number of trials continues to decline andfederal civil trials have almost completely disappeared. This essay attempts to address the significance of this loss, to answer the obvious question, "So what?" It argues against taking a resigned or complacent attitude toward an important problem for our public culture. It presents a short description of the trial's internal structure, recounts different sorts of explanations, and offers an inventory of the kinds of wounds this development would inflict.
Spoliation Of Electronic Evidence: Sanctions Versus Advocacy, Charles Adams
Spoliation Of Electronic Evidence: Sanctions Versus Advocacy, Charles Adams
Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works
This Article proposes that courts should refrain from imposing adverse inference jury instructions as sanctions for the spoliation of evidence. This proposal bears some similarity to the approach taken twenty years ago by the 1993 amendments to Rule 11, which constrained courts' ability to sanction. Instead of imposing an adverse jury instruction as a sanction for spoliation of evidence, courts should allow evidence of spoliation to be admitted at trial if a reasonable jury could find that spoliation had occurred and if the spoliation was relevant to a material issue. If a court allows the introduction of evidence of spoliation …