A Treatise On the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the United States, Volume 1
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A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of all Jurisdictions of the United States
(
This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, Vol. 1 of 4: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the ... States, England, and Canada (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Tria...)
Excerpt from A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, Vol. 1 of 4: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the United States, England, and Canada
The portion! Upiretion of this Treatiee is. First, to expound the Anglo Amerioan law of Evidence is a system of reasoned principles end rulee; eeoondly, to deal with the'epperently wetting mm of judicial precedent. Ee the consistent product of theee principles end rnlee; end. Thirdly. To furnish ell the materiel: for eeeerteining the preeent etete of the law in the hell e hundred independent American jurisdictione.
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Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, Vol. 2 of 4: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the ... States, England, and Canada (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Tria...)
Excerpt from A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, Vol. 2 of 4: Including the Statutes and Judicial Decisions of All Jurisdictions of the United States, England, and Canada
I: Some: Procedure of Notice; Person, Time, and Tenor. Same: (c) Failure to Produce; What constitutes non-production.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 2
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
A Pocket Code of the Rules of Evidence in Trials at Law (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from A Pocket Code of the Rules of Evidence in Tr...)
Excerpt from A Pocket Code of the Rules of Evidence in Trials at Law
The historian Judas Maccabaeus, in a preface of two thousand years ago, has supplied a concise and laudable canon for the task of an abridger. All these things, he says, we shall essay to abridge in one volume, with the endeavor to make it attractive to read, convenient to learn, and profitable to use.
The object of the present volume is twofold: to provide the practitioner with a handy summary of the existing rules of Evidence; and at the same time to state them in a scientific form capable of serving as a code.
The practitioner needs a handy summary. He must impress all rules of procedure into his memory, by frequent re-perusal, so as to have the details familiar at call. He must also have at hand a concise manual for ready reference when memory fails. Those needs the present book aims to meet.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
John Henry Wigmore was an American jurist and expert in the law of evidence.
Background
John Henry Wigmore was born on March 4, 1863 in San Francisco, the first of six children of John Wigmore and his second wife, Harriet (Joyner) Wigmore; he had a half brother by his father's first marriage. Wigmore's father, a native of Youghal, County Cork, Ireland, had immigrated to the United States and settled in San Francisco, where he became a furniture manufacturer and later a lumber merchant. Wigmore's mother, born in Warwickshire, England, had moved to San Francisco with her family as a young girl. Young Wigmore was reared in a strongly Episcopalian household.
Education
He was educated at the private Urban Academy in San Francisco and at Harvard, where he received the A. B. degree in 1883 and the A. M. and the LL. B. in 1887.
Career
In 1889 Wigmore accepted an appointment as professor of Anglo-American law at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan. In 1893, the year after his return to the United States, he became professor of law at Northwestern University. He was made dean of the law shool in 1901, a position he retained until his retirement in 1929. At Northwestern, which before his arrival was a law school of uncertain reputation and future, Wigmore championed the "case method" of legal teaching, developed originally at Harvard. Under his leadership, Northwestern played an important role in the movement to update and systematize legal education in the United States. Stimulated by competition from the new University of Chicago Law School, Wigmore was adept at raising funds to expand the facilities and staff of his school. During his long tenure as dean, Northwestern was noted for the variety of its course offerings and for instituting in 1919 - well ahead of most American law schools - an entrance requirement of a college bachelor's degree (or three years of college for students entering an enlarged four-year law program). Though Wigmore was an early proponent of clinical experience as a supplement to the formal law school curriculum, believing that legal aid work in Chicago would provide Northwestern students with an understanding of "the law in operation, " his principal concern was to make the school a center of legal learning. Scholarship, he felt, should be the "prime requisite" for service on his faculty, which he was pleased to commend as "the most prolific" in the country. Wigmore himself set an example of scholarly productivity that few could even attempt to emulate. While at law school he had been one of four students who founded the Harvard Law Review; in the next twenty-five years he firmly established himself, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. put it in 1911, as "the first law writer in the country". His only rival for that distinction was Roscoe Pound, whose career at Harvard had been preceded by a brief term on Wigmore's faculty at Northwestern. In all, Wigmore wrote or edited more than one hundred volumes dealing with such diverse subjects as torts, comparative law, criminal law and criminology, and legal history. Most celebrated was his massive A Treatise on the System of Evidence in Trials at Common Law, first published in four volumes in 1904-05, but expanded to ten volumes and more than 7, 000 pages by 1940, when the third edition appeared. It was, according to Felix Frankfurter, "unrivaled as the greatest treatise on any single subject of the law". Despite Wigmore's fondness for replacing traditional legal terminology with his own, the Treatise on Evidence was widely cited and admired. It sought to impose system on an "apparently warring mass of judicial precedents" and provided guidelines for a generation of procedural reformers. Along with his other works in the field, especially The Principles of Judicial Proof (1913), it reflected Wigmore's larger purpose of creating a "science" out of his subject, "a novum organum for the study of Judicial Evidence. " Characteristic of his innovative temperament was his campaign to make modern technical analysis of handwriting and other documents admissible in court. Always concerned to lay a "scientific" foundation for American law, Wigmore drew with profit on his unusually wide-ranging familiarity with the legal literature of other cultures. Originally he had planned to specialize in comparative law; while a young man teaching law in Japan, he had edited two books on the legal history of that country. Having been the principal architect of that conference, Wigmore became the first president of the newly organized American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. "In 1909, " he later recalled, "we knew and cared nothing about Criminology - he very name was unknown". Through the Institute's Journal as well as its Criminal Science Series, Wigmore labored to introduce Americans to leading European schools of criminology and thus establish the field on a sound basis in his own country. Skilled in many languages, Wigmore was an internationalist within his profession and without In 1928 he published the three-volume A Panorama of the World's Legal Systems, to edify lawyers and laymen alike by taking them on "a temporary flight above the earth. " So global a perspective was deeply appealing to Wigmore, who had been a supporter of both the League of Nations and the International Court of Justice - for which his name was advanced as a candidate. A founder of the Inter-American Bar Association, he attempted in the 1930's to promote "some sort of affiliation between the organized Bars of all nations, " noting with regret that law was the only profession without "formal means of mutual acquaintance" that crossed national boundaries. Broad as his interests and understanding were, Wigmore did not hesitate to proclaim his lack of sympathy with much that he saw in the world and in his own society. In his Panorama he brusquely dismissed the elaborate legal codes of the Soviet Union as the work of "ferocious political lunatics. " At home, having taken a leave of absence from Northwestern during World War I to serve on the staff of the Judge Advocate General (1917 - 19), where he attained the rank of colonel, Wigmore grew alarmed by what he regarded as radical threats to national security. Critical of those "tender champions of free speech" who showed "obtuse indifference to the vital issues at stake" during the war, he was generally approving of the subsequent crusade of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer against domestic dissent. In 1927, responding to Felix Frankfurter's caustic analysis of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, Wigmore rushed into print in Boston's Evening Transcript to defend the integrity of the Massachusetts court system. Denouncing Frankfurter as a "past master of evasion and insinuation, " he charged that agitation for the two condemned men had commenced "among various alien Communist circles. " Even President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, no friend to Sacco and Vanzetti, expressed displeasure in private at Wigmore's hyperbolic performance. Like many of his generation, Wigmore espoused a brand of reformism that upheld traditional moral and social values. Believing the deterrence theory to be "the kingpin of the criminal law, " he was impatient with the defense arguments of Clarence Darrow in the Loeb-Leopold murder trial of 1924. In his view, determinism had no place in a court of law, since "Society's right to eliminate its human weeds is not affected by the predetermined character of the weeds. " Much as he appreciated the educational opportunities offered by Northwestern's location in a great city, he was not a man who found the political complexities of American urban life agreeable. As early as 1889, when he published The Australian Ballot System, he had expressed concern over the nature of political practices in "our largest cities, " arguing for a secret ballot system that would eliminate corruption and "coercive influences" in municipal elections. Long a key member of the American Judicature Society, he tried but failed in the early 1920's to persuade the voters of Cook County to remodel their court system following principles of efficiency. He could mobilize lawyers to support the cause of judicial reform, but other interest groups were not with him. Though in his early years he had been irritated by what he would later remember as the "universal complacent torpidity" of the organized American bar, Wigmore eventually became a revered and often reverent member of that community. At Northwestern he sponsored a course entitled "The Profession of the Bar, " to expose students (with the help of lantern slides) to the deeds and words of "professional heroes" and thereby awaken "the deep sense of becoming a member of a great professional fraternity. " Not everyone should be permitted to enter the fraternity, Wigmore was sure. To require college education before law school, he told the American Bar Association in 1915, would exclude from the profession only and precisely those "poor young men" who lacked the motivation and stamina to make their way to and through college. Nothing would be lost in that event, since in his view the bar was already overcrowded with "shiftless, ill-fitted lawyers" who threatened to overwhelm quality with a "spawning mass of promiscuous semi-intelligence. " Only by maintaining standards of exclusivity did Wigmore feel the American bar could regain "its prestige of leadership in public thought. " As he told the A. B. A. in 1931, a year before he became the fourth recipient of its gold medal for "conspicuous service, " the legal profession in America had "latent national power. " Wigmore wanted to wield that power in part because it was his belief that every effective legal system in history depended upon the strength of "a highly trained professional class. " According to a close colleague, Wigmore was "the last Mid-Victorian. " Without becoming obsolescent, he retained ideals and even manners that derived from an earlier age. Tall and elegant, he moved about Northwestern carrying a green cloth bag that contained among other items pocket editions of Shakespeare and the Bible. Childless, he was in the habit of referring to law students as "his boys, " commanding respect but not inviting intimacy. Never having owned a car, he died in Chicago at the age of eighty of injuries received in a taxicab accident; he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In the years after his retirement as dean, he had continued to work full time on a variety of characteristic projects, including study in the emerging fields of radio and aeronautics law.
Achievements
Probably his most influential contributions to the study of comparative law were several multivolume publication projects that he planned, among them the Modern Legal Philosophy Series (1911 - 22), Continental Legal History Series (1912 - 28), and Evolution of Law Series (1915 - 18). Most notable for its impact was his Modern Criminal Science Series (1911 - 17), an outgrowth of the National Conference on Criminal Law and Criminology which met in Chicago in 1909. If he had not become fully a man of the twentieth century, he had not lost his appetite for inquiry and experimentation. In the end his immense professional reputation rested above all, as one admirer put it, on his diverse contributions as a "roving scholar. "
