Keywords
evidence; hearsay; reform; rules; federal rules of evidence
Abstract
I need to place the remarks that follow in context. And that means I need to acknowledge a number of heresies: I don’t like legal jargon; I don’t like the complexity of legal jargon; I don’t like the legal profession’s indifference to brevity; I don’t like the tendency of lawyers and judges always to be looking to the past for answers to novel questions; and I don’t consider law to be a science or remotely like a science. I want law to be simple and commonsensical and forward-looking. I take my judicial credo from a poem by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “And I grew weary of the sun / Until my thoughts cleared up again, / Remembering that the best I have done / Was done to make it plain.” Or, in the words of another though lesser known poet, Ezra Pound, “MAKE IT NEW!”
Recommended Citation
Richard A. Posner,
On Hearsay,
84 Fordham L. Rev. 1465
(2016).
Available at: https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/flr/vol84/iss4/7