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\"My preoccupation with witnessing mutated through several phases before it turned into the book you are holding. It germinated while I was writing my PhD dissertation at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, when the gulf between the theory of testimony that so enchanted contemporary thinking around the ethics of memory on the one hand, and the humanitarian practice of witnessing I was studying on the other, first struck me as philosophically awkward and politically suspect\"-- Provided by publisher.

This note analyzes the treatment of out-of-court statements in the Republic of North Macedonia’s (NMK) hybrid criminal procedure system, which blends adversarial and neoinquisitorial elements. Anchored in the principle of orality, NMK’s Criminal Procedure Law (CPL) generally prohibits the use of out-of-court statements against criminal defendants with four narrow exceptions. The article compares each exception with the approaches taken under U.S. constitutional and evidentiary law and the European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence. While three exceptions—preserved testimony, impeachment of testifying witnesses, and statements from threatened witnesses—are consistent with U.S. and European standards, the admission of statements given to prosecutors by unavailable witnesses is clearly impermissible under U.S. law and problematic under the European Convention on Human Rights. The analysis illustrates the tension between adversarial safeguards and continental evidentiary flexibility, raising concerns about fairness and the right of confrontation in evolving legal systems.

For more than a century, one of the pillars upon which the law of evidence was thought to rest is that the primary (although by no means exclusive) objective of the law of evidence is to further accurate fact-finding by maximizing the rationality of the evidentiary process. The crux of this pillar is that the law of evidence increases rationality (and thereby increases accuracy) through admissibility rules that (1) require reliable evidence, and (2) behave paternalistically toward jurors and their cognitive abilities.

Machines play increasingly crucial roles in establishing facts in legal disputes. Some machines convey information—the images of cameras, the measurements of thermometers, the opinions of expert systems. When a litigant offers a human assertion for its truth, the law subjects it to testimonial safeguards—such as impeachment and the hearsay rule—to give juries the context necessary to assess the source's credibility. But the law on machine conveyance is confused: courts shoehorn them into existing rules by treating them as \"hearsay,\" as \"real evidence,\" or as \"methods\" underlying human expert opinions. These attempts have not been wholly unsuccessful, but they are intellectually incoherent and fail to fully empower juries to assess machine credibility. This Article seeks to resolve this confusion and offer a coherent framework for conceptualizing and regulating machine evidence. First, it explains that some machine evidence, like human testimony, depends on the credibility of a source. Just as so-called \"hearsay dangers\" lurk in human assertions, \"black box dangers\" - human and machine errors causing a machine to be false by design, inarticulate, or analytically unsound-potentially lurk in machine conveyances. Second, it offers a taxonomy of machine evidence, explaining which types implicate credibility and how courts have attempted to regulate them through existing law. Third, it offers a new vision of testimonial safeguards for machines. It explores credibility testing in the form of front-end design, input, and operation protocols; pretrial disclosure and access rules; authentication and reliability rules; impeachment and courtroom testing mechanisms; jury instructions; and corroboration rules. And it explains why machine sources can be \"witnesses\" under the Sixth Amendment, refocusing the right of confrontation on meaningful impeachment. The Article concludes by suggesting how the decoupling of credibility testing from the prevailing courtroom-centered hearsay model could benefit the law of testimony more broadly.

The common law Rule of Completeness was designed to prevent parties from introducing incomplete—and thereby misleading—statements at trial. It ensured fundamental fairness by ensuring that a fact finder heard an entire statement or series of statements if the whole would “complete” the partial evidence presented. It served this important role in Anglo-American jurisprudence for centuries before the drafters of Federal Rule of Evidence 106 attempted to capture its essence in 1975. Unfortunately, what was once a simple and principled rule has been muddled by Federal Rule of Evidence 106 (FRE 106). The common law rule language was lost when FRE 106 was drafted, and there is no agreement as to what portion of the common law survived and what was left behind. Particularly problematic are the issues of whether FRE 106 applies to oral as well as written statements, and whether FRE 106 allows a court to admit otherwise inadmissible evidence. The federal and state courts are split on these issues, and the United States Supreme Court has failed to provide guidance. Academics and commentators in the past have suggested these issues should be solved by amending FRE 106. However, these suggested amendments have generally been limited to FRE 106 itself, and each has tucked the equivalent of a new hearsay exception into an amended 106—a departure from the otherwise well-ordered Federal Rules of Evidence. This Article critically examines current Rule of Completeness jurisprudence. It compares and contrasts the common law with FRE 106, and then dives deeply into state and federal courts disparate interpretations of FRE 106. Finally, it recommends that the Federal Rules of Evidence Advisory Committee resolve doctrinal conflicts inherent in Rule 106 and draft two new Rules of Evidence. First, it recommends an expanded and clarified Federal Rule of Evidence 106 that applies to both written and oral statements. Second, it recommends a new addition to FRE 803 that would create a hearsay exception for statements otherwise qualified for admission under FRE 106 but currently barred under the Rule Against Hearsay.

The Fourth Amendment requires that warrants be supported by \"Oath or affirmation\". Under current doctrine, a police officer may swear the oath to obtain a warrant merely by repeating the account of an informant. This article shows, however, that the Fourth Amendment, as originally understood, required that the real accuser with personal knowledge swear the oath. That real-accuser requirement persisted for nearly two centuries. Almost all federal courts and most state courts from 1850 to 1960 held that the oath, by its very nature, required a witness with personal knowledge. Only in 1960 did the Supreme Court hold in 'Jones v United States' that a warrant could rely upon hearsay. 'Jones' radically altered criminal investigations. But the decision rested entirely on policy preferences, ignoring text, original meaning, and rich contrary precedent. This article argues that we should return to the original understanding that the oath requirement bans thirdhand accounts. Remarkably, this is the first comprehensive study to consider whether the oath requires personal knowledge.

During his first 100 days as the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump launched Twitter attacks against “Fake Tears Chuck Schumer,” members of the Republican Freedom Caucus, and a district court judge; accused his predecessor of “wiretapping” his phone, though there was no evidence for the claim; and baffled observers by appearing to lament a nonexistent terrorist attack in Sweden. Here we argue not simply that Trump’s norm-shattering rhetoric deviates from that of his predecessors but also that his discursive patterns constitute a double-edged rhetorical identity or signature. This rhetorical signature both certified Trump’s authenticity as a change candidate to a constituency eager for the disruption of politics as usual and now complicates his ability to govern in a political system still accustomed to those conventions. Applied linguists have argued that “whereas in principle any speaker/writer can use any word at any time, speakers in fact tend to make typical and individuating co-selections of preferred words.” Although the concept of a “rhetorical signature” is not invariably attached to the outcome, computerized textual analysis has been used to identify linguistic differences among presidential candidates and presidents. Additionally, rhetoric scholars have isolated lines of argument, patterns of inference, and stylistic idiosyncrasies that not only distinguish one president from another but also affect governance. Here we label these characteristics a president’s rhetorical signature, a concept defined as “the symbolic marking distinguishing his mode of reasoning and expression from other presidents.” The rhetorical signature that Donald Trump deployed as a presidential candidate, as president-elect, and during the first 100 days of his presidency includes seeming spontaneity laced with Manichean, evidence-flouting, accountability-dodging, and institution-disdaining claims. By offering apparently impromptu messaging in scriptless speeches and tweets at unusual hours, Trump broke with the sanitized, prepackaged rhetoric of his predecessors. His apocalyptic contrasting of demise and deliverance, parsing of individuals as winners and losers, and demonization of those with whom he disagrees also differentiate Trump’s rhetorical repertoire from that of those who previously held the office. Moreover, unlike his predecessors, Trump dismisses uncongenial evidence from institutionalized custodians of knowledge such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He not only relies on hearsay, anecdote, and suspect information in partisan media but also shifts the burden of proof to those who oppose his conclusions and shuns responsibility for distributing faulty information. At the same time, more so than those who came before him, Trump rejects conventional standards of accountability, denies discernible reality, including some of his own past statements, and, when caught, distracts. Finally, more so than past presidential contenders, when it serves his advantage, Trump questions the integrity of democratic institutions, some of which can hold a president accountable for abuse of power or misuse of evidence, including the electoral system, the courts, the justice system, and the media. These attacks are consistent with his dismissal of American exceptionalism and with his assertion that the country is in crisis. We will treat each signature cluster in turn.

On its face, the Form I-213 appears to be a humble bureaucratic form unremarkable to the untrained eye. In reality, this document alone can singularly sustain the federal government's case for the deportation of a noncitizen in removal proceedings. The Form I-213 sits at the cradle of interlocking judicial and procedural norms within immigration practice that largely diminish the due process rights of noncitizens facing deportation. This Article sheds light on two important but relatively underexamined phenomena that undergird this system: how a disregard for evidentiary rules largely eliminates the government's burden of proof in removal proceedings and how judicial deference to government agents systemically enables this practice.