A warm welcome to our discussion of Victorian evidence law. We’ll start at the very beginning, and that is the principles of relevance, discretionary and mandatory exclusion. We travel through circumstantial evidence, particularly in criminal cases, before catching our first glimpse of the rules governing competence and compellability in witnesses. Examination in chief is our final destination, including non-leading questions, restoring memory, unfavourable witnesses and our first mention of Jones v Dunkel. It won’t be the last time we spot that case.In our next episode, we’ll finish up cross-examination and start looking at the evidentiary privileges.
You can find the notes, and other resources, here. The Judicial College of Victoria provides an absolute wealth of resources on relevance, circumstantial evidence in criminal cases, discretionary and mandatory exclusions, competence and compellability starting here, and examination in chief and re-examination.
Let’s shift to topics that don’t require quite the same level of heavy lifting that we’ve become used to. Today, we’ll look at identification...
Today we tackle the last of the evidentiary privileges - client legal privilege, before moving into the tricky rules of admissibility of credibility evidence....
This episode we’ll wrap up the relevant ethical principles that apply to barristers, looking at Part 5.4 of Schedule 1 of the Legal Profession...