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On the Supposed Jury-Dependence of Evidence Law
>Download Full Article (PDF file, 294 KB) If there were no juries, would there be a law of evidence? And should there be? These questions are not about whether this or that rule of evidence owes its existence to the institution of the jury, and are thus not about whether particular evidence rules should be modified or eliminated when juries are not present. Nor are they about those many rules of evidence that are premised on such wildly mistaken folk wisdom about jury behavior that they are in desperate need of modification or elimination in light of what we now know from the social sciences about how people in general and juries in particular actually decide and deliberate. Rather, my question is whether the law of evidence, in the large, is so substantially a product of the institution of the jury itself that if juries did not exist, then vast swaths of evidence law would, and should, not exist as well.
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