...TENDENCY AND COINCIDENCE EVIDENCE IN CRIMINAL CASES (Parts of this paper are a repetition of a paper I prepared for the Legal Aid conference last year and which was published in Bar News Criminal Law Special Edition.) Ian Barker QC 1. I have practised law from a time beyond which the memory of man runneth not. At least, that is how it feels. During those years I managed, I think, to develop a slippery hold on fundamentals of the law of evidence, from the myriad cases on the subject. I was recently heartened to read something written by Sir James Stephen in about 1886 in the Introduction to his Digest of the Law of Evidence1. Speaking of the difficulty in finding concise guidance to the law of evidence he said: No such work, so far as I know, exists; for all the existing books on the Law of Evidence are written on the usual model of English law-books, which, as a general rule, aim at being collections more or less complete of all the authorities upon a given subject to which a judge would listen in an argument in court. Such works often become, under the hands of successive editors, the repositories of an extraordinary amount of research, but they seem to me to have the effect of making the attainment by direct study of a real knowledge of the law, or of any branch of it as a whole, almost impossible. The enormous mass of detail and illustration which they contain, and the habit into which their writers naturally fall, of introducing into them everything which has any...
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...CONCEPT OF RELEVANCE IN THE LAW OF EVIDENCE IS NOT AS STRAIGHTFORWAD AS IT APPEARS TO BE.” DISCUSS It is difficult to spell out a straightforward definition of the concept of relevance (Tapper, p71). In the R v Nethercott case, it was held that any two facts to which the concept of relevance is applied are so related to each other that according to the common course of events, one either taken by itself or in connection with other facts, proves or renders probable the past, present or future existence or non-existence of the other. According to Lord Simon in DPP v Kilbourne, “Evidence is relevant if it is logically probative of some matter which requires proof… It is sufficient to say … that relevant (that is, logically probative or disprobative) evidence is evidence which makes the matter which requires proof more or less probable” (Allen, p8). Essentially, relevant evidence is that which makes the matter requiring proof more or less probable. In this sense, relevance is arguably an absolute concept, as proof of one fact either makes the existence of another more probable, or it does not. Notwithstanding, relevance is often regarded as variable, just as evidence can be regarded as more or less relevant. Zuckerman describes relevance as “having a contextual and dynamic nature”, and the relevance of one fact to another can be judged on its own or in connection with other facts (Zuckerman, p46). This seems to relate more to the cogency of the evidence, given its relevance, but...
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...Bus 650 The Research Process What is the research process? The research process is a sequential process involving several defined steps. Each step does not require completion before going to the next. It is a simple means of effectively locating information for a project. The several steps you will need to outline and cover during the research process are: 1. Choose your topic 2. Find basic information 3. Refine your topic 4. Locate and retrieve materials 5. Evaluate relevancies of materials 6. Take notes 7. Construct your project Selecting a topic is the most important decision you will make during a research process. When you are choosing your topic, you want to select a topic that you are interested in, or that has been assigned to you. If you have trouble selecting a topic browse you can browse online databases, journals or magazines. Use basic information on your topic. Use key terms or words from your topic and search for basic information in reference such as books, online databases, web sites, library and catalogs. By doing this search you can determine if you have to much or not enough information available. Sometimes refining your topic may need to occur depending on the quality of information and number of items located. If you don’t get enough information broaden your topic, if you get too much information narrow your topic. When your topic has been identified you can begin to locate and retrieve your information. Make sure...
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...a means of describing and analyzing the way people convey meanings in real life interactions. The maxim of quantity refers to how much information is necessary in a particular conversation. In observance of this maxim according to Grice, “one should make his or her contribution as informative as required” and “one should not make his or her contribution more informative than is required” in a conversation. The maxim of quality on the other hand, pertains to how truthful is the information given by the speaker in a conversation. With regard to this maxim, according to Grice, the speaker must “not say what he or she believes to be false” and “must not say what he or she lacks adequate evidence for.” The maxim of relation pertains to the relevance of the information that the interlocutor give in a conversation. Finally, the maxim of manner deals...
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