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Against ‘Free Proof’

1997; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021223700015405

2047-9336

Alex Stein,

Legal Education and Practice Innovations

Consider the following statements, which describe the Anglo-American laws of evidence: The rules of evidence state what matters may be considered in proving facts and, to some extent, what weight they have. They are largely ununified and scattered, existing for disparate and sometimes conflicting reasons: they are a mixture of astonishing judicial achievements and sterile, inconvenient disasters. There is a law of contract, and perhaps to some extent a law of tort, but only a group of laws of evidence. In one of our classics of literature, Alice in Wonderland , one of the characters is the Cheshire Cat who keeps appearing and disappearing and fading away, so that sometimes one could see the whole body, sometimes only a head, sometimes only a vague outline and sometimes nothing at all, so that Alice was never sure whether or not he was there or, indeed, whether he existed at all. In practice, our rules of evidence appear to be rather like that.