Welcome to Evidence
This course covers the rules and limitations codified in the Federal Rules of Evidence that determine what information can be presented in a legal proceeding.
Transcript
Welcome to Evidence! Designed for upper-level law students, our evidence course features 18 lesson videos divided into five Chapters, as well as 190 practice questions. It surveys the Federal Rules of Evidence.
Chapter 1 explores the bedrock concept of relevance. We all know that evidence must be relevant to be admissible, but there’s much more to it. Here, we’ll define relevance, explore the special case of character and habit evidence, and learn some common instances where even relevant evidence may be excluded on public policy grounds.
Chapter 2 explores an exciting aspect of trial procedure: examining witnesses. Here, we’ll learn when a witness is competent to testify, the sequence and scope of the examination, how to impeach a witness, and how the rules treat opinion testimony from laypersons and experts.
In Chapter 3, we’ll learn about the basic hearsay exclusion. After that, we’ll study the most important exemptions and exceptions to the hearsay rule, and we’ll discover how the hearsay doctrine relates to the Sixth Amendment right to confront adverse witnesses.
Chapter 4 covers certain evidentiary privileges that, when invoked, may exclude otherwise admissible evidence. They are: the attorney-client privilege, the spousal privileges, and the doctor-patient privilege.
Chapter 5’s first lesson explores the need to authenticate documents and tangible evidence. The second explains the best evidence rule, which generally prefers an original document over a duplicate or summary. The third and final lesson covers judicial notice, which lets the court acknowledge certain obvious propositions without needing evidence to prove them.
If you watch all our lesson videos and attempt all our practice questions, you should be primed to pass your Evidence exam with room to spare. Let’s get started.