Skills & Values: Evidence

Abstract:     
These materials were created to assist professors in incorporating lawyering skills into their substantive evidence class. They are intended to give students the experience of thinking about and applying evidence doctrine as they would in real practice. At the same time, most of the authors' students have found that they have a much better grasp of the doctrine when they can see it in a practice context.

Each chapter offers a stand-alone exercise which focuses on a particular rule under the Federal Rules of Evidence. (It is envisioned that chapters will be assigned to correlate with the particular rule being studied in class.) The exercises – which often include documents, diagrams, photographs and trial transcripts – require the student to put doctrine into action. Sometimes they will make an argument to the trial court; other times, they will conduct discovery, interview witnesses, examine witnesses on the stand to lay evidentiary foundations, or voir dire those witnesses to weaken the foundation.

Each chapter includes a “self-study” component. Here, the authors provide their approach to the exercise. They are not the answers, because the lawyering activities involved are not in the nature of true-false questions. Different lawyers will approach the same problem differently. The exercises involve doctrinal interpretation, judgment, strategy, argumentation, and often ethics.

Many of the chapters include e-materials on a website accompanying the text. These materials include a video demonstrating the impeachment of a witness with an inconsistent statement and an omission using the witness’s written statement, adversarial video arguments to which the student will be asked to respond, a 911 recording, and transcripts with voice-overs illustrating an interview seeking information to satisfy conditional relevance, an examination laying the foundations for a business record, and a voir dire aimed at attacking the foundation for an excited utterance. The web site also includes links to select United States Supreme Court Cases used in these materials.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 2

Keywords: Evidence, evidence supplement, advocacy

Accepted Paper Series