Evidence Commons^™

A Call For Better Abortion Data: Common Ground Amid Dobbs And The Abortion Debate, J. Jackson Hill

Loyola University Chicago Law Journal

There is room for compromise in the U.S. abortion debate. Specifically, improving abortion data is an untapped issue with significant bipartisan appeal. Better data will lead to more-informed abortion policy and promote shared public health priorities, like the reduction of unintended pregnancies. Unfortunately, the current abortion reporting system falls short of providing these benefits. There is no national law governing the collection and reporting of abortion data. Americans must therefore rely on information voluntarily provided to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guttmacher Institute. The result is data that is inaccurate, non-uniform, and untimely. To remedy the …

Book Review: The Art And Craft Of Judgment Writing: A Primer For Common Law Judges, Steve Leben

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Forensic Microbiome Evidence: Fourth Amendment Applications And Court Acceptance, Trason Lasley

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

No abstract provided.

Ai Risk Assessment Tools Amid The War On Drugs: Productive Or Counterproductive?, Matin Pedram

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

The War on Drugs refers to a situation in which all the processes of production, distribution, and consumption of all illegal drugs are prohibited. This ambitious goal has imposed considerable costs on societies. The war has weaponized harsher punishments such as life imprisonment, execution, and long-term incarceration against drug offenders. Nonviolent offenders, those who possessed illegal drugs, have been easy targets for governments to show that the war is still ongoing. Although some countries became pioneers in changing the laws to end this costly war, Iran and the United States have made their stance on the drug issue clear, and …

Eliminating Cash Bail In Washington State—Amending Criminal Rule 3.2, Simran Kaur

Seattle University Law Review

This Note discusses the following three parts. Part I provides an overview of the cash bail system, its history, and its contemporary use in Washington state. Part II presents the effects of bail on pretrial release, analyzing low-income and racial inequalities and the adverse impacts it can have on the accused. Part III focuses on solutions and alternatives to the cash bail system, using other states as case studies.

Promoting Corporate Diversity: The Uncertain Role Of Institutional Investors, Jill Fisch

Seattle University Law Review

Two developments are having an impact on corporate decisions. One is the increased engagement by institutional intermediaries and a shift in the focus of that engagement from corporate governance to environmental and social issues. The other is a heightened societal awareness of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) issues, particularly the importance of diversity in corporate leadership. This Article considers the intersection between the two. It describes how institutional investors have focused their attention on increasing diversity in corporate leadership, the potential motivations for that focus, and the impact of that focus, to date. It highlights the tensions that result from …

America’S Hidden Citizens: The Untold Stories Of The Unconscionable Deportations Of Its International Adoptees, Halley Cody

Seattle University Law Review

This Note addresses how the U.S. should rectify the harms it has perpetrated on non-citizen adoptees by amending the current deportation statutes to prevent their deportation. Part I addresses the history of adoption in the U.S. and related effects on immigration law. Part II highlights the stories of Adam Crapser and Philip Clay, who were adopted by American families who failed to naturalize them as minors, and who were subsequently deported after they sustained criminal records. Part III examines the policy goals behind deportation as a consequence of criminal convictions, as well as remedies instituted to prevent unwarranted deportation and …

Inadequate Privacy: The Necessity Of Hipaa Reform In A Post-Dobbs World, Katherine Robertson

Seattle University Law Review

Part I of this Comment will provide an overview of HIPAA and the legal impacts of Dobbs. Part II will discuss the anticipatory response to the impacts of Dobbs on PHI by addressing the response from (1) the states, (2) the Biden Administration, and (3) the medical field. Part III will discuss the loopholes that exist in HIPAA and further address the potential impacts on individuals and the medical field if reform does not occur. Finally, Part IV will argue that the reform of HIPAA is the best avenue for protecting PHI related to reproductive healthcare.

Law's Credibility Problem, Julia Simon-Kerr

Faculty Articles and Papers

Credibility determinations often seal people's fates. They can determine outcomes at trial; they condition the provision of benefits, like social security; and they play an increasingly dispositive role in immigration proceedings. Yet there is no stable definition of credibility in the law. Courts and agencies diverge at the most basic definitional level in their use of the category.

Consider a real-world example. An immigration judge denies asylum despite the applicant's plausible and unrefuted account of persecution in their country of origin. The applicant appeals, pointing to the fact that Congress enacted a "rebuttable presumption of credibility" for asylum-seekers "on appeal." …

Reforming Prior Conviction Impeachment, Julia Simon-Kerr, Anna Roberts

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Is Silence Golden?, Tracey Maclin

UF Law Faculty Publications

Absolute constitutional rights are rare—even the venerable rights of free speech and freedom of religion are not absolute. In criminal prosecutions, the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel has been described as the most important of all rights because it affects a defendant’s ability to assert his or her other rights. But the right to counsel is not unlimited.

Yet one right is absolute. A criminal defendant has an absolute right not to testify in his own criminal trial. The text of the Self-Incrimination Clause of the Fifth Amendment—“no person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to …

Baker V. Women & Infants Hospital Of Rhode Island, 268 A.3d 1165 (R.I. 2022), Melissa Richi

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Shifting The Male Gaze Of Evidence, Teneille R. Brown

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

In this article I target the altar at which many of us worship—the pursuit of rationality. For evidence purposes, rationality is defined as decisions that are reasonable, objective, inductive, and free from the bias of emotion. This view of rationality is deeply embedded in evidence scholarship and practice. It is also reflected in evidence rules like FRE 403, which treat emotional testimony as unfairly prejudicial simply because it is emotional. The anti-emotion view of rationality reflects the thinking of Western philosophical giants. Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Bacon all thought that men should strive for rationality by suppressing their emotions, because …

Universal Forms Of Influence: Support For Women On Boards, Cindy A. Schipani, Paula J. Caproni

Seattle University Law Review

There are various efforts underway to increase gender diversity on corporate boards, including legislation in California, a recent SEC approved comply or explain rule for companies listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and efforts by institutional investors such as State Street and BlackRock to recognize the value diversity brings to corporate decisionmaking. Although some of these efforts are being contested in the courts, many companies have begun to comply with these initiatives.

This Article is organized as follows. Part I provides an overview of several efforts to increase gender diversity on boards along with numerous research studies showcasing the benefits …

“Statistics Are Human Beings With The Tears Wiped Away”: Utilizing Data To Develop Strategies To Reduce The Number Of Native Americans Who Go Missing, Lori Mcpherson, Sarah Blazucki

Seattle University Law Review

On New Year’s Eve night, 2019, sixteen-year-old Selena Shelley Faye Not Afraid attended a party in Billings, Montana, about fifty miles west of her home in Hardin, Montana, near the Crow Reservation. A junior at the local high school, she was active in her community. The party carried over until the next day, and she caught a ride back toward home with friends in a van the following afternoon. When the van stopped at an interstate rest stop, Selena got out but never made it back to the van. The friends reported her missing to the police and indicated they …

The Incongruence Principle Of Evidence, Hillel Bavli

Indiana Law Journal

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 inferences and judgments. I …

The Private Attorney General In A Time Of Hyper-Polarized Politics, Myriam E. Gilles

Articles

With the enactment of the Federal Trade Commission Act (“FTC Act”) in 1914 and the Wheeler–Lea Act in 1938, Congress sought to establish a brawny federal consumer protection regime to guard against the myriad unfair and deceptive practices that threatened harm to American consumers. But courts in this era interpreted these statutes to confer exclusive enforcement authority in the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), declining to infer a private right of action. For many decades, the resulting enforcement gap in consumer protection law was filled largely by state Unfair and Deceptive Practices Acts (“UDAPs”), which sanction litigation by both public and …

Beliefs And Probabilities: The Errors That Remain Are Mine Alone, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Imagine that the preface to a professor’s book implicitly asserts that all the propositions in the rest of his or her book are true, but explicitly acknowledges that experience would suggest some errors remain among those propositions. The prof thereby seems paradoxically to believe inconsistent statements. But in fact this famous preface paradox is an illusion. The first statement is a belief reflecting epistemic uncertainty, while the second is a probabilistic statement about aleatory uncertainty. If one were to convert the probability into a belief, one would see that the author rationally holds perfectly consistent beliefs.

Likewise the lottery paradox …

Theorizing Corroboration, Maggie Wittlin

Faculty Scholarship

A child makes an out-of-court statement accusing an adult of abuse. That statement is important proof, but it also presents serious reliability concerns. When deciding whether it is sufficiently reliable to be admitted, should a court consider whether the child’s statement is corroborated—whether, for example, there is medical evidence of abuse? More broadly, should courts consider corroboration when deciding whether evidence is reliable enough to be admitted at trial? Judges, rule-makers, and scholars have taken significantly divergent approaches to this question and come to different conclusions.

This Article argues that there is a key problem with using corroboration to evaluate …

When To Be Objectionable… And How Not To Be An Artless Clay-Brained Pignut, Leonard Niehoff

Articles

Having taught evidence for more than 30 years. I've become fairly good at predicting the questions students will ask, especially the questions that are hardest to answer. One of those typically comes after we've discussed how to object to evidence. We've worked through the basics: Stand up, speak up, say that you object, and briefly explain why. At this point a student almost always raises his or her and says something like this: "OK. I understand the how part. But when do I object?"