This course is run largely in the fashion of a seminar. Each student must submit a substantial research paper. Each student must present his or her paper to the class. In general, students are expected to do much of the talking in the course. However, to get the course underway -- and to suggest possible paper topics -- I (Peter Tillers) will do a disproportionate part of the talking during the first half of the course.

I have picked some topics in Evidence that intrigue and baffle me. I did not choose those topics because I understand them and can impart my understanding to you. I chose them mainly because they baffle me. (I suspect that these topics also baffle everyone or almost everyone else.)

I will begin the semester by discussing rules of evidence in cases involving claims of sexual misconduct. How much time I devote to this sprawling topic depends in large part on the interests and preferences of the members of the course. After discussion of rules of evidence in sexual misconduct cases, I will move on to various other evidence topics, topics that lie, I think, at the frontiers of the law and theory of evidence.

• In my basic course on the law of evidence I sometimes proceed in a relatively structured, didactic, and one-sided manner. In this course, however, I prefer to proceed in a more free-form and interactive manner. For example, instead of lecturing you about the basic features of some facet of the character evidence rule (e.g., the rape shield laws), I may discuss a case or a web site in which some aspect of some jurisdiction's rape shield law is discussed, leaving it to you to read literature or cases that describe the general landscape and history of rape shield legislation. My objective is to tell you enough to get you started and let you explore the details of particular problems or issues yourself. In this way, I hope, we will educate each other.
  

All participants in the course are expected to attend class regularly, and all members of the course are expected to participate regularly in class discussion.

The reading assignments are sketched on the Topics Web Page. But at this point (December XX, 2005) those reading assignments are only rough and tentative. They will become significantly less rough and tentative only as we proceed through the course. This is because (i) this course is a seminar and I want to tailor the readings and the discussion in the course to your interests and preferences (which we will fully learn only as we proceed through the course materials) and (ii) I fully expect to be learning about these topics from our discussion of related topics and I want to take advantage of what I think I have learned.