Federal Rules of Evidence | Hacker News Reader

Federal Rules of Evidence

rulesofevidence.org

29 pointsjstalin15 comments

Why is this here? I'm not one of those people who complain about off-topic posts, I'm just genuinely perplexed as to what people find interesting about this.

I'm an attorney and I upvoted just because it's so hard sometimes to find user-friendly primary legal resources. This makes it easy to search the rules -- that's rare (believe it or not)!

But what does that have to do with with the HN audience?

Sometimes it's helpful to understand why and why not evidence can be submitted in court... things like the DPR trial, for instance, start to make sense. Just general intellectual curiosity, I suppose.

Try Cornell Law's extensive on-line collection of statutes and rules -- the Fed. R. Evid. are at http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre

I have. It's become spammy with ads and you can't limit your search to just a specific topic, like the rules of evidence, or civil procedure, etc. (as far as I can tell).

Click "Search", don't use the box at the top right that says "Search all". It will bring you to a page like this:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/search

Which as you may be able to tell from the URL, limits your search to the FRE.

Wow you are right. I just went there and after clicking on a link had a popup that asked if I wanted to make a regular donation.

No screen grab however this link was on the popup:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/tmp/popups_and_cookies

Then I clicked close and an ad started to blast and auto play a video advertisement.

Not only is it off-topic, but this is pretty much a USA-only post.

I'm not sure that that's necssarily a bad thing. Even if it is a bad thing, I'm not sure what exactly, if anything, could be done about USA-only posts.

HN has plenty of USA-only posts all the time, often even Silicon Valley-only posts. Sometimes there are India-only posts. Given a certain critical mass of users living in a certain country, posts which happen to only be relevant to that country can make it to the front page. Particularly when few users will down-vote a post solely for being country-specific.

How about this: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469676 (a Bayesian interpretation of federal rule of evidence 401). More generally, the FRE and the FRCP are really amenable to the sort of system analysis that comes naturally to engineers.

[Warning: severe geekery ahead]

E.g. consider 28 U.S.C. 1446, which governs when a case filed in state court can be removed to federal court by the defendant. Not all cases are removable--the case can be heard in federal court only if federal jurisdiction exists. However, cases are removed immediately upon filing a notice of removal--if the plaintiff contests federal jurisdiction, she has to file a motion to remand in the federal court.

Why do it this way instead of having filing a motion to remove in the state court and waiting for a decision on whether the case is removable? Because it decreases the latency of the whole procedure to let things get going in federal court and figuring out after the fact whether removal was proper. Usually, removal will have been proper and no remand will be necessary. This sort of pattern should be familiar to any engineer--this is exactly what a CPU does when it predicts a taken branch, starting execution of the branch target before resolving the branch condition. It decreases the latency of the branch, and because mispredicts are rare, the CPU rarely has to flush the speculatively-executed instructions.

Wonderful metaphor.

I'm given pause by the possibility that, in the case of the federal court, the work done in the 'predicted' branch might prejudice the outcome of the branch selection in a way that's either not possible or easily preventable in the CPU case.

It's great to see more legal materials online, but this is not well done. It does not contain dates that would allow you to determine if it is up to date, and it does not contain committee notes that help interpret the rules. See law.cornell.edu[1] for an example of a great way to make law accessible.

[1] Ex: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre

The Cornell version seems so much better that 'dang should swap the links.

I liked it just because it's mobile friendly. The cornell site is not. And as mentioned in other comments, cornell is super spammy now.

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