
Federal Rules of Evidence - jstalin
http://www.rulesofevidence.org
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berberous
Why is this here? I'm not one of those people who complain about off-topic
posts, I'm just genuinely perplexed as to what people find interesting about
this.

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rayiner
How about this:
[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469676](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1469676)
(a Bayesian interpretation of federal rule of evidence 401). More generally,
the FRE and the FRCP are really amenable to the sort of system analysis that
comes naturally to engineers.

[Warning: severe geekery ahead]

E.g. consider 28 U.S.C. 1446, which governs when a case filed in state court
can be removed to federal court by the defendant. Not all cases are removable
--the case can be heard in federal court only if federal jurisdiction exists.
However, cases are removed immediately upon filing a notice of removal--if the
plaintiff contests federal jurisdiction, she has to file a motion to remand in
the federal court.

Why do it this way instead of having filing a motion to remove in the state
court and waiting for a decision on whether the case is removable? Because it
decreases the latency of the whole procedure to let things get going in
federal court and figuring out after the fact whether removal was proper.
Usually, removal will have been proper and no remand will be necessary. This
sort of pattern should be familiar to any engineer--this is exactly what a CPU
does when it predicts a taken branch, starting execution of the branch target
before resolving the branch condition. It decreases the latency of the branch,
and because mispredicts are rare, the CPU rarely has to flush the
speculatively-executed instructions.

~~~
jMyles
Wonderful metaphor.

I'm given pause by the possibility that, in the case of the federal court, the
work done in the 'predicted' branch might prejudice the outcome of the branch
selection in a way that's either not possible or easily preventable in the CPU
case.

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mikecb
It's great to see more legal materials online, but this is not well done. It
does not contain dates that would allow you to determine if it is up to date,
and it does not contain committee notes that help interpret the rules. See
law.cornell.edu[1] for an example of a great way to make law accessible.

[1] Ex:
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre](http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre)

~~~
tptacek
The Cornell version seems so much better that 'dang should swap the links.

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jstalin
I liked it just because it's mobile friendly. The cornell site is not. And as
mentioned in other comments, cornell is super spammy now.

