Pohnpei Rules of Evidence Handbook with Common Objections & Evidentiary Foundations

This small, handy, Pohnpei Rules of Evidence Handbook with Common Objections & Evidentiary Foundations was designed to be brought to court and be at your side in the office. In addition to just the rules of evidence, this handbook contains a unique "added value" - an 80-page appendix (based on U.S. law) which offers practical guidance and advice on how to make objections, establish evidentiary foundations, impeach witnesses at trial, and offer expert testimony. Such information is especially important for junior lawyers, less experienced or less confident lawyers, or anyone who may want a refresher or some new ideas about introducing evidence in court, especially digital evidence such as emails, text, and social media evidence.

The appendix contains a 16-page section on making and responding to common objections as well as a 60-page section on evidentiary foundations and impeachment. The section on foundations and impeachment contains more than 25 examples in transcript form of the most common evidentiary foundations used in the United States and a brief discussion of differing standards for authenticating digital evidence (such as email, text messages, social media sites, and internet cites). Those examples are not intended to suggest what you must do to admit such evidence in your country, but they can provide some guidance on how lawyers and judges can develop their own standards for the admission of such evidence. Look at the “Expanded Appendix Index” available for viewing from the “Read sample” tab under the image of the book’s cover to see a list of more than 110 topics covered in appendix to this book.

The author is an American law professor who was a Michigan criminal trial lawyer and has been a full-time law professor for over 50 years - a professor at the University of Hawaii Law School for the past 46 years and at Wayne State Law School in Detroit Michigan for 5 years in the 1970s. His students, under his supervision, in Hawaii and Michigan, have represented real clients in real cases every year he has been teaching. He has taught evidence since 1981 and has been the Director, and now Co-Director, of his law school's Clinical Program since 1978. In that program, under court rules, law students are allowed to appear in court to represent individual clients, government organizations, and NGOs, He has been a member of the Hawaii Supreme Court's Standing Committee on the Rules of Evidence since 1993. For the past 50 plus years, he has taught a criminal clinic in which his students try traffic and minor criminal cases under the state student practice rule.

He has published over 135 evidence handbooks for all 50 U.S. states, territories, and affiliated jurisdictions, the federal and military rules of evidence, Pacific Island, Asian, and African countries, Australian states, Canadian provinces, and the United Kingdom. This handbook, and other similar handbooks, were inspired by handbooks he created in 2019 for a workshop for Pacific Island Judges from American Samoa, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap. He has also published two cartoon captioning contest books on the topics of trial evidence and negotiations & ADR. And don’t miss his book on breaking impasses in negotiation and mediation, called Negotiation and Mediation Communication Gambits for Breaking Impasses and More.