A country is as progressive as its
legal system is. Without a strong and effective administration, the progress of
any country is sure to get stupefied. It is the legal system that maintains
discipline and regulation of any country. The importance of a strong legal
system is immense in order to ensure the safety of the civilians of any
country. An effective legal system talks about uniformed rules for everybody in
the country. There shouldn’t be any unfair division of advantages and disadvantages.
Federal rules of evidence or shortly
known as FRE is a set of laws that govern the admission process of facts that
will help the parties of the United Stated Federal court system to prove their
criminal as well as civil cases. These rules were first enacted in the year
1975. Before enacting the rules in 1975, these rules were judicially and
legislatively examined. The U.S. states have the authority to either apply or
reject these codes. But in reality most of the states have adopted the set of rules
whether partly or wholly. There are few exceptional states which have set their
own rules and regulations. These rules are primarily applied in the federal
trial courts for primary presentation of evidence in trials. These are not
primarily applied in appellate courts since the function of appellate courts is
very composed and very few questions are addressed in appellate courts. Though,
appellate courts do follow the application procedure to maintain timely
development of the rules. In most of the American Law schools these rules are
focused in evidence courses.
The general intention of rules of
evidence is to standardize the evidence that the jury normally use to reach to
the conclusion. The key purpose of Federal Rules of Evidence is to
eliminate the distrust which was there earlier with rules of evidence. But even
after that there are some rules that bring about the mistrust of the jurors.
Along with this, these rules focus on few basic ideas like relevance,
inequitable surprise, overall directness of the opposition process etc. Judges
hold the power to exclude evidence that may have an impact on any party due to
confusing or inflammatory nature or its tendency to waste the time of the
court.
There are altogether 67 rules which
are divided in 11 articles.
1. General
Provisions
2. Judicial
Notice
3. Presumptions
in Civil Actions and Proceedings
4. Relevancy
and its Limits
5. Privileges
6. Witnesses
7. Opinions
and Expert Testimony
8. Hearsay
9. Authentication
and Identification
10. Contents of
writings, recordings and Photographs
11. Miscellaneous
Rules
