Excited Utterance

Confession and Confrontation. Will Ortman from Wayne State University discusses how the modern Confrontation Clause might be used to help improve the reliabilty of defendant confessions.

Of Bass Notes and Base Rates. Rebecca Tushnet from Harvard Law School discusses the base rate problems that surface in the expert testimony common in music copyright litigation.

Expert Framework Evidence. Teneille Brown from the University of Utah and Emily Murphy from UC Law San Francisco discuss their amicus brief in Diaz v. United States, to be argued before the Supreme Court on March 19, 2024. The case involves (and the episode explores) the problem of framework evidence, first described by John Monahan and Laurens Walker, and how it relates to Federal Rule of Evidence 704, which abolishes the ultimate issue rule, except for cases involving mental states.

Evidence Law's Blind Spots. Jamie Macleod from Brooklyn Law School argues, among other things, that evidence law needs to worry as much about what juries do in the absence of certain evidence as in the presence of it. He discusses new empirical work showing some troubling racial disparities when mock jurors are presented with so-called sanitized evidence, such as when the fact of prior convictions is revealed without specific details.

Evidence Rules for Decarceration. Erin Collins from the University of Richmond explores how the evidentiary rules -- especially the character rules -- contribute to mass incarceration, and how evidence should reorient itself more toward substantive outcomes than away from just accuracy. This episode was recorded live at a Connecticut Public Interest Law Journal symposium at UConn School of Law.

A Theory for Evaluating Evidence Against the Standard of Proof. Kevin Clermont from Cornell Law School argues that existing probabilistic models of the proof process are incomplete and summarizes his proposal -- based on a multivalent model -- to conceptualize legal proof.

Experts and the Attorney-Client Privilege. Nicholas Hakun from Temple University and Wilson Sonsini discusses whether the attorney-client privilege should extend to experts used by attorneys and their clients.

Expert Malpractice. James Steiner-Dillon from the University of Akron discusses what happens when clients sue their expert witnesses for malpractice, and why traditional rules of witness immunity should not apply.

Vermin of Proof. Kristen Ranges from the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium discusses the scientific bases behind animal toxicology studies and whether the legal system is being overly skeptical about their use in toxic tort cases.