Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On the Origins and Prospects of the Humanistic Study of Law
- I PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCHOLARSHIP IN LAW AND THE HUMANITIES: THREE VIEWS
- II IDEAS OF JUSTICE
- III IMAGINING THE LAW
- IV LINGUISTIC, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL PROCESSES IN LAW
- V INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES
- 17 Trials
- 18 Testimony, Witnessing
- 19 Judgment in Law and the Humanities
- 20 Punishment
- Index
- References
18 - Testimony, Witnessing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2010
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: On the Origins and Prospects of the Humanistic Study of Law
- I PERSPECTIVES ON THE HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE OF SCHOLARSHIP IN LAW AND THE HUMANITIES: THREE VIEWS
- II IDEAS OF JUSTICE
- III IMAGINING THE LAW
- IV LINGUISTIC, LITERARY, AND CULTURAL PROCESSES IN LAW
- V INSTITUTIONAL PROCESSES
- 17 Trials
- 18 Testimony, Witnessing
- 19 Judgment in Law and the Humanities
- 20 Punishment
- Index
- References
Summary
“Testimony” is a richly multivalent term. It describes the statement of a witness in court, “offered as evidence of the truth of that which is stated;” but it is also a profession of religious faith, and a story habitually narrated in the first person by those who seek to bear witness to the role of traumatic events in the formation of larger historiographical narratives. This is the essential ambiguity of the term “testimony”: That it not only encompasses narratives of personal experience, which require no immediate external verification, but that it also seeks to be regarded as a species of evidence – that it is articulated in a public forum with a view to establishing its “truth.” Indeed, jurists acknowledge that there is a sense in which testimony is the sole medium of judicial evidence: Putative distinctions between testimony and circumstantial or documentary evidence founder upon the requirement that documents and things produced in court must nevertheless be described (and their provenance accounted for) by a witness.
The centrality of testimony to the trial process has ensured the emergence of cogent rules to test its validity, which often operate simultaneously to suppress its similarities to narrative fiction and story. Current Anglo-American law is concerned to establish the competence and compellability of a potential witness to the fact at issue: Competence relates to whether or not a party may be permitted to testify, and compellability refers to whether or not that party may be forced to do so by the service of witness summons and the provision of sanctions in the event that such a summons is ignored.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Law and the HumanitiesAn Introduction, pp. 478 - 495Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, and , eds. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996) 19–20Google Scholar
, A Preliminary Treatise on Evidence at the Common Law (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1898) 518–9Google Scholar
, Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 48–56Google Scholar
, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) 3–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , eds., Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 1200–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 358–99
, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–1769) vol. III, 359–60 and 374–5Google Scholar
, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London and New York: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar
, “Scales of Justice: Defence Counsel and the English Criminal Trial in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 9 (1991) 221–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Rise of the Contentious Spirit: Adversary Procedure in Eighteenth-Century England,” Cornell Law Review 75 (1990) 497–609Google Scholar
, “An Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers,” An Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers and Related Writings, , ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 158Google Scholar
, The Law of Evidence in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 1Google Scholar
, Advocacy and the Making of the Adversarial Criminal Trial 1800–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)CrossRef
, On the Admissibility of Confessions and Challenge of Jurors in Criminal Cases in England and Ireland (Dublin: Milliken, 1842)Google Scholar
, A Rationale of Judicial Evidence, Specially Applied to English Practice, 5 vols. (London: Hunt & Clarke, 1827) vol. IV, 490–2Google Scholar
, Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; repr. 2006) ch. 1Google Scholar
, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)Google Scholar
, Rousseau, Robespierre, and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, 2 vols. (London: Robinson, 1793) vol. I, 275Google Scholar
, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) 104–5 and 109Google Scholar
, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar
, Clarissa's Ciphers: Meaning and Disruption in Richardson's Clarissa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 67Google Scholar
, “The Treachery of Perception: Evidence and Experience in Clarissa,” University of Cincinnati Law Review 63 (1994), no. 1, 165–93 at 190–2Google Scholar
, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, and , trans. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981; repr. 1998) 48Google Scholar
, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998) 77–83Google Scholar
, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 49Google Scholar
, “Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in and , eds., This Is Enlightenment, forthcoming from University of Chicago Press, 2010Google Scholar
, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2002)Google Scholar
, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) ch. 1Google Scholar
in The Crime in Mind: Criminal Responsibility and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar
“‘The Anatomy of a Barrister's Tongue’: Rhetoric, Satire, and the Victorian Bar in England,” Victorian Literature and Culture (2004) 287–305
, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar
, Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (London: Routledge, 1996)Google Scholar
, Literature and Legal Discourse: Equity and Ethics from Sterne to Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Bar and the Old Bailey, 1750–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) ch. 4Google Scholar
, Bleak House [1852–3] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; repr. 1978) ch. Lii, 706–7Google Scholar
, Voice and the Victorian Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 1–7Google Scholar
, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; repr. 1995) 27Google Scholar
, Dickens' Villains: Melodrama, Character, Popular Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 3, 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Tendencies of Religious Thought in England 1688–1750,” in Essays and Reviews (London: Parker, 1860) 259Google Scholar
, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, , ed. and trans. (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984) 58CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) 18Google Scholar
and , Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992) 5Google Scholar
, ed., Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1977) 9
, “Assessing Contentious Eyewitness Evidence: A Judicial View,” Witness Testimony: Psychological, Investigative, and Evidential Perspectives, et al., eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) 327–43Google Scholar