Davis v. Happyland Toy Co.

Outline:

• In a wrongful death action, both the deceased and the surviving spouse or personal representative are considered “parties” for all evidentiary purposes.
• Whenever the defendant offers statements of either the decedent or the spouse, such statements qualify as an opposing party’s statement and are not hearsay.
• A surviving spouse in a wrongful death action is not a party for purposes of establishing harm or injury.
• It is not relevant and may be prejudicial that a surviving spouse suffered as a result of the death
• Evidence that is admissible for other purposes is not rendered inadmissible because it provides evidence that a surviving spouse suffered.

Notes: It’s important for a couple of purposes to understand who the “parties” are to a case. Generally that just refers to who is suing and who is being sued, and it’s important because it establishes who is most directly affected, which is relevant for answering a couple of important questions. As simple as that sounds in theory, it gets complicated in practice. In this year’s case, for instance, Andy Allen is suing on behalf of Lee Allen, who can’t sue because s/he’s dead. What’s Andy Allen’s relationship to the case then? Is s/he a party because s/he’s the one suing? Or isn’t s/he, because s/he’s not suing in her own name, but on behalf of another’s estate? This case law answers those questions, essentially by saying “it depends.” Surviving spouses like Andy Allen are parties for evidentiary purposes: basically, anytime when you’re evaluating whether or not evidence can come in under the Midlands Rules of Evidence, Andy Allen is a party. The case law specifies that this is true in particular for the party-opponent hearsay exemption, so anything Andy Allen said that the defense wants to bring in will probably get past hearsay. Surviving spouses like Andy Allen are not parties for purposes of establishing harm. If you go back and look at the selections from the Midlands Civil Code we’re given, the third thing the plaintiff has to prove under Rule 1200 is that the plaintiff suffered injury. Injuries Andy Allen suffered don’t count towards proving that, because this case says s/he isn’t a party. Only injuries Lee Allen suffered matter.

Case Law Bonus Post: Karan v Baboons, Inc

Notes: The vast majority of, if not all of, college civil cases (and certainly this year’s) are “bifurcated” (separated) into liability and damages phases, and we only try the liability phase. In the liability phase, the goal is to establish whether or not the defendant owes the plaintiff money. “Damages” is another term for the harms the plaintiff suffered (examples of which include pain, suffering, and death). It’s also used to refer to the money paid in compensation for such harm. If there is a damages phase, then its been determined that the defendant does owe the plaintiff money and the question being decided is how much. This case law essentially beefs up the relevance and waste-of-time objections with respect to evidence that goes mostly towards the magnitude of damages. The plaintiff is allowed to introduce evidence to establish the existence of damages, but not to wax endlessly on about how great those damages were. In this case, for instance, while establishing that Lee Allen died would be relevant to establish damages, spending a great length of time establishing how painful his/her death likely was probably wouldn’t be. This case law can be brought out to support a relevance objection to such testimony.

Case Law Bonus Post: Thomas v Davis

Outline:

• The purpose of pleadings is to:
• Frame the issues for trial
• Permit the parties to frame their presentations accordingly
• It is inappropriate for a party:
• which has alleged or denied something in its complaint or answer
• to seek to prevent its adversary from presenting otherwise admissible evidence that relates to that thing
• by asserting that it is no longer interested in alleging or contesting that particular thing.
• Parties may choose which evidence they wish to present and which arguments they wish to emphasize at trial

Notes: This case eliminates teams’ ability to pull a particular trick, which works like this: often in Mock Trial there are several points that are disputed in the case. Let’s take an example from State v. Dawson, the 2011-2012 college case. The defendant was charged with DUI and murder; the prosecution had to prepare its case with an eye to proving both of those charges. Without this case law, the defense could have shown up and objected to relevance to all evidence that went to the DUI and not the murder, saying that they were willing to concede the DUI now, so disputing it was no longer relevant. That’s a bad legal trick but a very handy Mock Trial one, since it could cripple entire witnesses and require on-the-fly substantial reworking of closings. This case law forbids that tactic. The complaint and the answer, included in the case materials, set the standard for what is and isn’t relevant, not what the parties concede or contest at trial.

Case Law Bonus Post: Tarot Readers Association of Midlands v. Merrell Dow

Outline:

• In assessing reliability under Davis v Adams, judges should consider, among other factors:
• Whether the theory or technique has been or can be tested
• Whether it has been subjected to peer review and publication
• Whether it has a known error rate
• Whether it has gained widespread acceptance within the field
• These factors are not dispositive
• Reliability assessments must be made based on the totality of the circumstances
• The proponent of the expert testimony must prove reliability by a preponderance of the evidence.

Notes: This case hearkens back to Davis v. Adams, clarifying the meaning of “reliable” as used in that case. For an explanation of the meaning of “preponderance of the evidence,” see Filteau v. Wanek. Despite all the concrete-sounding terminology used in the case, notice how vague the final conclusion is. Judges should assess reliability based on the totality of the circumstances- basically, this case just instructs judges to look at all of the factual circumstances surrounding an expert’s testimony to assess whether or not it is reliable. That’s a reasonable principle to follow, but it doesn’t give us a clear, solid outline for what’s involved in making a reliability assessment. One of the ways you’ll often see this case misused is opposing counsel will argue as if the factors it lists as suggestions (like widespread acceptance in the field) are in fact requirements, and because you haven’t specifically addressed whether your expert’s method is peer-reviewed his conclusions are inadmissible. Correct that assumption whenever you see it, reminding the judge that the factors this case law lists are neither dispositive (conclude the issue) or exhaustive (covering all the possible factors).

Case Law Bonus Post: Richards v Mississippi BBQ

Notes: Much like Coburn Camera Crew v. Ellicott City, this case ends a skirting-the-rules trick that used to be deployed in college Mock Trial. Rule 703 essentially tells us that an expert’s conclusions can be admissible even if the data underlying them is not. Quite often in college Mock Trial, the data underlying an expert’s conclusion is hearsay. You used to be able to put that hearsay in via Rule 703, simply by having the expert say “I concluded [hearsay content]” instead of “I was told [hearsay content].” This case ends that option, explicitly forbidding experts from being “conduits who merely repeat what they are told.” In using this case law to prevent someone from using an expert to bring in hearsay through the “I concluded [hearsay content]” trick, it is probably best to still begin with a hearsay objection. If they then use Rule 703 to excuse the hearsay, counter with an argument from this case law. If you’re on the other side of that argument, being illegitimately accused of bringing in hearsay when you’re bringing in an expert conclusion, your strongest argumentative strategy will be to point out the ways in which your expert is processing his data- how he isn’t just reciting hearsay but adding something to the hearsay which may in fact underlie his conclusions.

Case Law Bonus Post: Coburn Camera Crew v. Ellicott City & Davis v. Adams

Coburn Camera Crew v. Ellicott City
Notes: A brief college mock trial history lesson is in order: there used to be a fun trick you could play with character evidence. The main character evidence rule, Rule 404, references “person,” like this case law indicates. And it used to be that nothing in the case materials made it clear that corporations were people, so you could enter character evidence more or less freely if you could successfully argue that corporations and businesses weren’t people and couldn’t have character traits. This case law forbids that trick, making clear that all the character evidence rules apply to businesses as well as people. Nothing in this case law is especially distinct from the character evidence rule, so if you understand that rule you understand this case law. It may be worth noting that the language of the second sentence- “businesses sued for negligence or recklessness generally may not defend themselves on the grounds that they acted safely with respect to other situations and activities that are separate from the case at hand”- is a more explicit forbidding of that tactic than is found in the Rules of Evidence, and could potentially be used aggressively to exclude evidence the actual character evidence rules would be unclear on. Clear examples of that possibility from this year’s case do not come to mind, however.

Davis v. Adams
Notes: Rule 702, as you probably know, describes the foundation necessary for an expert witness to testify to his conclusions. This case law in effect raises that standard: you have to not only persuade the judge that the proper foundation for the testimony has been laid, but that the testimony will be reliable. How exactly that’s done is clarified by Tarot Readers Association of Midlands v. Merrell Dow; suffice it to say that standard foundational description of the techniques your expert used and the data they relied upon should give you sufficient argumentative fodder to meet this standard.

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.