Case Law Bonus Post: Riley v Jones & Jeff v Wario's Toolkit

Riley v. Jones
Notes: This ruling essentially gives us a shortcut for applying Filteau in the particular situation of determining who wrote an email. A restatement of the first sentence would be: the fact that an email is listed as from an address that belongs to a particular person allows us to assume that the email was sent by that person in order to determine its admissibility, absent reason to think it was sent by someone else. Presumably we could’ve gotten to that conclusion if we’d worked those facts (an email from an address attributed to someone) through the logic of Filteau, but this case law saves us that trouble.

Jeff v. Wario’s Toolkit
Notes: This case law is very brief but very important, because it makes an important clarification to what the plaintiff is trying to do in a civil case, and what the defense is trying to do when they use an affirmative defense. You probably already know that the plaintiff has to prove their case. That might sound very black and white, but the truth is proof comes in a variety of degrees. The question of “how sure do we have to be?” is answered by a legal concept called the ‘burden of proof’, which tells us how sure we have to be in different kinds of cases. Here we have to have a “preponderance of the evidence.” This case law tells us that means it must be proved that all elements are more likely than not true. That way of putting it is usually rephrased to use probabilities: the plaintiff has to prove that each element of their claim has a greater than 50% chance of being true. The defense must do the same for their affirmative defense claims.