Interesting Articles
Is the legal industry broken? Does the legal industry incentivize dishonesty?
Not Legal Advice
Law Professor Reveals Shocking Truth About Hearsay
by G. Michael Fenner
"Great lawyers can convince average Judges of almost anything and even average Judges can ignore the best argument of great lawyers."
"It is always admissible, and even when it is not, you can get around it by hiring an expert witness to use it to form an opinion that will be admissible."
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1518631
Can that Really be Admitted into Evidence?
by Danielle Musselman
"I think of hearsay and the accompanying exceptions like a cheat code for evidence admission."
"If you know the definition and the exceptions, then your ability to admit hearsay evidence is nearly unlimited."
The Silver Bullet Method: The Rise of False Allegation in Divorce and Custody Cases
by: Padideh Jafari, Esq. former NYU and Southern California Institute Law Professor and CEO of Jafari Law & Mediation Office
“The Psychiatric Times estimates that false abuse allegations appear in 2% to 35% of all cases involving children.”
“Currently, there are limited ramifications for making false allegations in family court.”
“The damage caused by false allegations extends beyond individual cases, it undermines the credibility of the legitimate abuse claims and strains the entire family court system.”
The Unsettling Truth About Our Legal System
by: Adam Benforado, professor of law at the Drexel University Kline School of Law and the New York Times best-selling author of Unfair and A Minor Revolution. Graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School, he served as a federal appellate law clerk and an attorney at Jenner & Block
"But as I gained more experience and began to look more critically at what I was being taught, the doubt reappeared. Much of the great edifice of the law—the case holdings, statutes, and guiding legal principles—seemed to rest on untested assumptions"
"The further I progressed in my career, the clearer it became that this scientific account of human behavior did not support the legal one—quite the opposite."
"Justice wasn’t blind at all"
"There was no such thing as an unbiased judge: every member of the bench was looking through lenses tinted by their identities and experiences. And factors meant to be irrelevant frequently tipped the scales. People whose parole hearings were first thing in the morning were far more likely to be granted release than those who had the bad luck of being scheduled at the end of the day"
"I wrote my book, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice, because I am convinced that everyone needs to understand the nature and magnitude of the threat our justice system faces. And that’s why I’ve been traveling around the country speaking with judges, prosecutors, defenders, forensic scientists, and members of the general public. Even people working in the system do not grasp the scope of the problems or the realistic steps we can take to address them."