Evidence Commons^™

Considering The Libel Trial Of Émile Zola In Light Of Contemporary Defamation Doctrine, Peter A. Zablotsky

Touro Law Review

Touro Law School's three-day conference on the Dreyfus affair provided an opportunity to re-examine the libel trial Émile Zola. A modern view on tort law is provided to analyze this case as if it unfolded today.

Response Essay: Some Observations On Professor Schwartz's "Foundation" Theory Of Evidence, Paul F. Rothstein

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Professor David Schwartz's A Foundation Theory of Evidence posits an intriguing new way to look at Evidence. It asserts that offered evidence must meet a tripartite requirement before it can be relevant. The tripartite requirement is that the evidence must be "case-specific, assertive, and probably true." His shorthand for the tripartite requirement is that evidence must be "well founded." Hence, he calls his theory the "foundation theory of evidence" and claims this foundation notion is so central to evidence law that it eclipses in importance even relevance itself. The tripartite requirement inheres in the very concept of evidence and relevancy, …

Compelled Production Of Encrypted Data, John E.D. Larkin

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

There is a myth that shadowy and powerful government agencies can crack the encryption software that criminals use to protect computers filled with child pornography and stolen credit card numbers. The reality is that cheap or free encryption programs can place protected data beyond law enforcement's reach. If courts seriously mean to protect the victims of Internet crime--all too often children--then Congress must adopt a legal mechanism to remedy the technological deficiency.

To date, police and prosecutors have relied on subpoenas to either compel defendants to produce their password, or to decipher their protected data. This technique has been met …

"[This] I Know From My Grandfather:" The Battle For Admissibility Of Indigenous Oral History As Proof Of Tribal Land Claims, Hope M. Babcock

American Indian Law Review

A major obstacle indigenous land claimants must face is the applicationof federal evidentiary rules, like the hearsay doctrine, which block the useof oral history to establish legal claims. It is often oral history and storiesthat tribes rely upon as evidence to support their claims, reducingsubstantially the likelihood of a tribe prevailing. Indigenous oral historypresents unique challenges to judges when faced with its admissibility.Canadian courts have largely overcome these challenges by interpretingevidentiary rules liberally, in favor of the aborigines. As such, Canadianaborigines have enjoyed greater land claim success than indigenousclaimants in the United States, raising the question why United Statescourts do …

Incriminating Thoughts, Nita A. Farahany

Faculty Scholarship

The neuroscience revolution poses profound challenges to current selfincrimination doctrine and exposes a deep conceptual confusion at the heart of the doctrine. In Schmerber v. California, the Court held that under the Self- Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment, no person shall be compelled to “prove a charge [from] his own mouth,” but a person may be compelled to provide real or physical evidence. This testimonial/physical dichotomy has failed to achieve its intended simplifying purpose. For nearly fifty years scholars and practitioners have lamented its impracticability and its inconsistency with the underlying purpose of the privilege. This Article seeks to …

Brief Of Amici Curiae, Neil Vidmar Et Al., Connecticut V. Guilbert, Neil Vidmar, Theresa A. Newman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Location, Location, Location: A "Private" Place And Other Ailments Of Georgia Surveillance Law Curable Through Alignment With The Federal System, Mary B. Martinez

Georgia Law Review

Georgia visual surveillance law prohibits any person
from observing, photographing, or recording any other
person in a private place and out of public view without
the consent of all persons observed. The rigidity of this
all-party consent requirement and the ambiguity of the
private/public place distinction leave investigators and
prosecutors in Georgia guessing as to the admissibility of
visually recorded evidence much of the time. On the other
hand, federal visual surveillance law encompasses a one-
party consent exception and is couched in terms of a
reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth

Amendment. Moreover, several federal courts have stated …

Summary Of Reno Newspapers V. Gibbons, 125 Nev. Adv. Op. 23, Daniel M. Ryan

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The Court considers whether after a public records lawsuit commences, when a party requests records from a state entity, and that state entity withholds the requested records, is the requesting party entitled to a log containing a factual description of each withheld record and a legal basis for nondisclosure. Also, the Court considers what the state entity withholding records is required to provide to the requesting party in prelitigation situations.

Dancing With The Big Boys: Georgia Adopts (Most Of) The Federal Rules Of Evidence, David N. Dreyer, F. Beau Howard, Amy M. Leitch

Mercer Law Review

Georgia has become the forty-fourth state to model its new evidence rules on the Federal Rules of Evidence. The new code will go into effect on January 1, 2013, 150 years from when Georgia's first legal code was published. Passage of the 2013 Georgia Evidence Code did not come easy, but was a product of years of debate, compromise, and vetting from legislators, the judiciary, academia, and members and groups of the practicing bar. The new code is largely derived from the Federal Rules of Evidence, but Georgia has retained a significant amount of evidence rules from its prior code …

Evidence, John E. Hall Jr., W. Scott Henwood

Mercer Law Review

The biggest story in Georgia Evidence law this year is undoubtedly the Georgia General Assembly's decision to align Georgia's evidence code with the Federal Rules of Evidence. Proponents of House Bill 24 describe the former rules, many of which have been on the books for more than 150 years, as archaic and inconsistent. Paul S. Milich, professor of law at Georgia State University College of Law and the reporter for the State Bar of Georgia committee that proposed the new rules of evidence for Georgia, described the way the outdated rules impeded the modern practice of law in Georgia: "Our …

Pleading And Proving Foreign Law In The Age Of Plausibility Pleading, Roger M. Michalski

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Revisiting The Similar Fact Rule In Singapore: Public Prosecutor V. Mas Swan Bin Adnan And Another, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The similar fact rule in Singapore—as with the law on any evidence law doctrine that can be found in both our Evidence Act and the common law—has required clarification for some time. This note, which discusses the latest local decision on the similar fact rule, considers if that decision is compatible with the Evidence Act and the various conceptualisations underlying the doctrine.

Finding Evidence On Facebook, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Corroborative Effect Of Lies, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

PP v Kamrul Hasan Abdul Quddus [2010] SGHC 7; Kamrul Hasan Abdul Quddus v PP [2011] SGCA 52. Overview of the case: In PP v Kamrul Hasan Abdul Quddus, the accused was charged with murder. He and the deceased had been in a tumultuous relationship, and the main evidence that connected the deceased’s death to the accused, apart from the fact that her body was found in the construction site that the accused worked at, was that DNA taken from her rectum tested positive for semen that matched his DNA.

More On The Impeachment Of Criminal Defendants, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Hiring Teams, Firms, And Lawyers: Evidence Of The Evolving Relationship In The Corporate Legal Market, Michele M. Destefano, John C. Coates, Ashish Nanda, David B. Wilkins

Articles

How are relationships between corporate clients and law firms evolving? Drawing on interview and survey data from 166 chief legal officers of S&P 500 companies from 2006-2007, we find that-contrary to standard depictions of corporate client-provider relationships-(1) large companies have relationships with ten to twenty preferred providers; (2) these relationships continue to be enduring, and (3) clients focus not only on law firm platforms and lead partners, but also on teams and departments within preferred providers, allocating work to these subunits at rival firms over time and following "star" lawyers, especially if they move as part of a team. The …

Constitutional Law—It Wasn’T Me! Zinger V. State And Arkansas’S Unconstitutional Approach To Third-Party Exculpatory Evidence. Zinger V. State, 313 Ark. 70, 852 S.W.2d 320 (1993)., Bourgon B. Reynolds

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.

Plea Bargaining, Discovery, And The Intractable Problem Of Impeachment Disclosures, R. Michael Cassidy

Vanderbilt Law Review

Several recent high-profile cases have illustrated flaws with the government's discovery practices in criminal cases and have put prosecutors across the country on the defensive about their compliance with disclosure obligations. The conviction of former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens on ethics charges was set aside after it was revealed that federal prosecutors withheld notes of an interview with a key government witness; one member of the Stevens prosecution team who was under investigation for contempt subsequently committed suicide. The Supreme Court remanded a double murder case from Tennessee for potential resentencing after it was revealed that state prosecutors had withheld …

More On The Future Of Present Sense Impressions, Jeffrey Bellin

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Brain Scans As Evidence: Truths, Proofs, Lies, And Lessons, Owen D. Jones, Francis X. Shen

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This contribution to the Brain Sciences in the Courtroom Symposium identifies and discusses issues important to admissibility determinations when courts confront brain-scan evidence. Through the vehicle of the landmark 2010 federal criminal trial U.S. v. Semrau (which considered, for the first time, the admissibility of brain scans for lie detection purposes) this article highlights critical evidentiary issues involving: 1) experimental design; 2) ecological and external validity; 3) subject compliance with researcher instructions; 4) false positives; and 5) drawing inferences about individuals from group data. The article’s lessons are broadly applicable to the new wave of neurolaw cases now being seen …