G'day everybody and welcome to LS 13010 Evidence and Proof. I'm Dr Anthony Marinac and I'm going to be lecturing in this subject for this semester. Evidence and proof is really quite an exciting subject and a lot of students are excited to do it. The reason for this is that it's really the first time in your degree that you get the opportunity to genuinely feel like a lawyer. Most of the time, through most of our subjects, we spend time teaching you about the law. So we'll teach you about contract law or torts law or criminal law or property law. Evidence, along with your advocacy subjects, are the two subjects where we really take the time to try and teach you how to be a lawyer. Evidence law... is all about how you take facts and evidence and string them together so that you can put them in front of a court and win your case. Having said that, a lot of students also find evidence to be quite an intimidating subject, and some of you are probably feeling a little bit intimidated by the subject right now. That's fine. Evidence has a reputation for being quite complicated and for involving quite a number of minute and difficult rules. In some ways that's true, but if you can manage contract law or corporations law, you're going to have no trouble with evidence. And what we're going to try and do through this semester is maintain a focus on the practical use of evidence law so that we're not getting too bogged down in the details. In this first lecture, I'm going to talk to you first up about the learning processes that we're going to use during this semester to cover the material. We'll talk also about the assessment process and then we'll start to cover the general material for this first topic. So let's get underway. Each week I'm going to be presenting one of these podcast lectures. The lectures will aim for around about 40 minutes duration, give or take a little bit each way. And each lecture comes with an associated PowerPoint presentation. I'm generally using the PowerPoint presentations as prompts when I'm actually delivering the lectures here in the office. So it's probably worthwhile for you to be following along with the PowerPoint slides when you're following the podcast. Having said that, the lecture and the PowerPoint slides are really only covering the very basic ground very briefly. They are not going to be enough on their own to give you sufficient information to pass the course. Along with the lectures and the PowerPoint slides, you'll also find that each week there's posted some quite extensive course notes. The course notes are the core of the course and I really do suggest that you read the course notes each week. In addition I've prescribed readings from the textbook David Fields book Evidence Law in Queensland. This is really an excellent textbook not only because it covers all of the material and it has a specifically Queensland focus but also it's written in a way that's really quite easy to understand and quite comprehensible so I really recommend that you get it get that book and follow the readings In addition, I'm suggesting that you have a look at a book called Cross on Evidence. Cross on Evidence is edited by His Honour Justice Hayden of the High Court and it really is the standard professional work for evidence law in Australia. covers all the states of Australia. It has quite a bit of Queensland specific content. Cross on Evidence is the textbook that the High Court is going to refer to if it hasn't quite decided a question one way or another on evidence law. So if you're looking at practising in an area of law where evidence is something that you expect to be dealing with on a regular basis, it's worth thinking about investing in Cross on Evidence now because you'll use it for the better part of your career. Having said that it costs a couple of hundred dollars so I'm not going to insist that everybody go out and buy it at this point in time. In addition to the lectures, the course notes and the textbook I've set a range of readings and cases which will be available to you on the Moodle site. I think that it would be useful to at least brush over those and to read more either if you find the stuff interesting or if there's something that you're not quite following. There's one thing that worries me a little bit about the fact that most of the cases are being provided to you. One of the key legal skills that you must develop during your undergraduate years is the ability to go and hunt down these cases for yourself. Now I'm providing them to you because I realise that many of you are studying in areas where access to law libraries or access to even computerised databases may be problematic. So I would suggest that each week you at least look for a couple of these cases on your own. pretending that I hadn't told you exactly where they were, so that you can continue to develop those skills. In addition to all of that we have an online bulletin board every week. I would like the online bulletin board to be a place where you as students can collaborate with one another in your learning. I'll be watching the online bulletin board very carefully and I'll chime in to assist where I can. But I wouldn't like to think that I'll be doing that too often because I think that these things work best when we provide an environment for you to learn from and with one another without having me getting in the way all the time. I'm not assessing anything to do with bulletin board participation because I think that when you do so, people become very constrained in their contributions. So I'd like to see people be as active as you possibly can on that bulletin board. I think that evidence law requires you to experience evidence and I'd like to do that on a weekly basis. It's quite difficult to do that of course because we're not all in a lecture theatre somewhere where we can physically work together to pretend that we're in court and doing evidence stuff. So instead what I'm doing is every week i'll point you towards a particular scene usually from a hollywood movie and each scene each week is going to have something to do with the evidence material that we've been discussing through the week and by doing by looking at those and by answering some tutorial questions and jumping on the bulletin board and presenting your thoughts you're going to have the opportunity to actually get your hands dirty with evidence, to actually start playing with evidence law that we've been learning and see how it might operate in the courtroom. Because once you see how it might operate in the courtroom, a lot of these evidence laws actually start to make sense. So you can see that what I've said with my tongue in cheek on the PowerPoint slide is that learning evidence law just from an academic perspective would be like learning to drive by reading the manual. If you actually want to develop the skills, what you have to do is get stuck into it and so our experiential questions relating to Hollywood movies will hopefully give us an opportunity to do that. Alright let's talk about the assessment process shall we. This is of course the bit that everyone would be very very happy if we didn't have to go through but it is kind of necessary. There's going to be three items of assessment for evidence law. The first is going to be a written essay to a maximum of 1500 words. Now this is essentially a theory essay to try and see whether you've gotten your head around the idea of evidence law as opposed to the specific application of evidence law principles. The topic is very general and it gives you an opportunity to make an argument. and to express your views. And the question that I'm using this term is essentially, should we have evidence law at all? Is there any purpose to it or is it really just an arbitrary set of rules that actually prevents rather than assisting courts to get at the truth? Now, two things I'll say about the written essay. First is that there's no right answer. So please, please don't put yourself through the process of trying to work out what I think is the right answer and then try to write something that you think is going to impress me by agreeing with my views. I'm going to be just as happy to see a great answer which goes one way or another. So you might argue that evidence law is fantastic, that it's what sets the common law world aside from the rest of the world and it really... prescribes a good set of sensible principles. On the other hand, you might say that evidence law is all nonsense and it should be simply replaced by something else. That's fine. I don't mind either way. What I'm looking to see is whether you can demonstrate and deploy some good, strong theoretical knowledge about evidence law to show me what you've been learning. The second part of the process is going to be an experiential exercise and that will also be worth 30% of your final grade. Now the experiential exercise is going to be based on the classic 1957 Henry Fonda movie 12 Angry Men. This is in my view anyway by far and away the best courtroom drama that was ever made even though only a few seconds of it actually happens in the courtroom. For those of you who have never seen it before, the 12 angry men are members of a jury and they are a jury that has to try to determine the outcome of a murder trial. And in fact, even though the movie is now coming on for 60 years old, it was done so brilliantly that there really haven't been any attempts since then to set movies in the jury room, because nobody's ever going to do it as well as it was done in 12 Angry Men. What I'm going to ask you to do in relation to 12 Angry Men is to go through and pick out some of the aspects of evidence law which are shown up in that movie and the movie is very, very rich. It is replete with examples of evidence law in action. I think you're going to find that this will be a really interesting exercise, one that you'll really enjoy. Then at the end of the semester we come to the final exam. It's going to be a standard open book invigilated written exam. I've started in some of the other subjects that I teach moving away from invigilated exams but I think it really does work and is really quite necessary in evidence law because part of using evidence law Particularly in a courtroom context for those of you who go into the advocacy world is being able to get your head around it very quickly under pressure. If you're going to be cross-examining a witness then you need to be working out what's happening with evidence law on the fly so that you can object to things as they go on in front of you and at the same time be preparing your cross-examination which might start in just a few minutes time. So there is actually a purpose in terms of having some part of this subject tested in a sort of a high pressure invigilated way. Having said that, what I'd really ask you to remember and hopefully those of you who've come across me before on the way through your course will already get this. My purpose is to teach you and then at some point of course I cease being your teacher and I become your assessor. But even as your assessor, my purpose is not to fail you. I'm not out to get you. So what I'm looking for when you go through all of these assessment items is any excuses I can find to give you marks. Don't see me as an opponent to be overcome. What I want you to do is deploy the knowledge that you've obtained through this course to show me what you know so that I can reward you for what you know. Having said that, that's not an excuse for just doing a brain dump. That's not an excuse for just telling me anything that you can think that may potentially be relevant to the topic and hoping for the best. All right, that's the assessment process. Okay, that's the early housekeeping out of the way, except to say that I am available to you both through the bulletin boards, through email and if necessary on the phone. Please don't hesitate to get in touch with me. I really am here to try and make sure that you walk away at the end of the semester with the best possible knowledge of evidence law that I can give you. So please don't hesitate to get in touch if there are things that are not adequately explained in the materials that you've got in front of you. So let's look at evidence law. Once upon a time, way back in history, most of what we now think of as the justice system, most of it was conducted by clerics, by members of the church. And so God as an idea was very prominent in early justice. They also didn't have DNA evidence or video recorders. So a lot of the time, evidence to be put before a court was really quite incomplete. so they settled on some quite unusual ways to determine innocence and guilt trial by ordeal for instance involved taking an accused person and putting them through some sort of ordeal in order to give God an opportunity to inspire a miracle and save them from that ordeal on the PowerPoint slide you can see trial by ordeal with a witch being dunked into a river this was a curious way of holding a trial because the idea was that according to ecclesiastical thoughts at the time witches weighed less than other women so witches would float and innocent women would sink to the bottom of the river and they would drown but they would die a good Christian death while the the witches would be taken down the river and then presumably recaptured and executed now Most of you are probably thinking at this point in time that that's not a particularly good way to determine criminal guilt, and you're right. So when did we start with evidence law? when did we start looking at having actual laws that defined the ways in which we ought to be proving people's innocence or guilt before a court Well, you could pick any number of starting points, but my favourite starting point is the Magna Carta, which was famously laid down in 1215. The Magna Carta has a bunch of provisions in it, some of which provide the basis for modern human rights, and some of which are quite outrageously bad. But one of the good ones is Article 38, which says, In future, no official shall place a man on trial on his own unsupported statement without producing credible witnesses to the truth of it. Now let's think about this. We're in 1215. If you're a peasant in 1215, you have basically no rights. You're essentially the property of the knights or the nobles or the barons. And if one of them decided that you were guilty of something, then you were guilty of it. There was really no reason in that manner of thinking for you to have to have fair trial or evidence against you. all of a sudden the magna carta changed that the magna carta said that somebody is not guilty just because their local baron says that they are guilty if the local baron wants to show that they are guilty they must produce credible witnesses and that's essentially what the court asks people to do today From then on, from 1215 onwards, what we see in the common law is a gradual development of evidence law through to the evidence law we have today. And in Queensland, as we'll learn in more detail throughout the course, we still have evidence law that is primarily based upon the common law as it's been delivered to us from both English and Australian sources. So there's not one single place where you can go and say, here is the body of Queensland evidence law. Some of it comes from the Evidence Act 1977 with which we'll all become very familiar, but the rest of it comes from the common law as far back in some cases as the 15th and 16th centuries. So where does evidence law fit? All of you by now will have learned about the ILAC or the IRAC process of legal reasoning. We've probably done this to death through the degree. Every time you get a legal problem, you're supposed to take four steps. First identify the legal issue, then identify the relevant law, then apply the facts to the law, and finally conclude by providing advice to your client or by telling the examiner what the likely outcome is going to be. Evidence law happens almost entirely within the A part of the ILAC or IRAC process of legal reasoning. We're applying the facts to the law. Now there's a bunch of questions that come up straight away, and they've probably occurred to you in previous subjects. The first question is, how do we know what the facts actually are? The second question is what if the parties don't agree on the facts and in most cases the parties won't agree on the facts. The rules of evidence essentially exist in order to answer those two questions. What are the facts? And how do we separate parties? How do we choose between parties when the parties have competing views on what the facts are? If you find yourself getting confused by rules of evidence throughout this semester, it often helps to wind it back and start with the basic purpose. What is this rule and how does this rule help us to work out what the facts actually are in any case? To understand the relationship between facts and evidence, we need to understand the specific use of a couple of terms. We're going to start with facts. What is a fact? Well the facts are everything that you could possibly know about any contested legal decision. On the PowerPoint slide there you can see that I've got a picture that's been taken of two cars that have clearly had a collision. The facts include everything. The facts include the precise amount of fluid that's been spilled from the car. The facts include the tyre marks. The facts include the time of day, what the weather was like, how fast the cars were going, whether there was alcohol in the blood system of the drivers, what colour the awning is on the building behind the crash scene, exactly what temperature the fluid was, exactly what thickness the brake pads were, Every single fact in that photo is a fact. In reality of course, Nobody ever captures all of the facts. Nobody captures absolutely everything that is knowable about a specific incident. What they do capture, we call information. So the information is a subset of all the facts. The information is the data that we actually have learned about an incident or an issue or a dispute. Police, when they arrive at the scene of something like an automotive accident, are trained to immediately begin gathering information because immediately after an incident occurs, the facts start to go away, the information starts to degrade, people wander off, a site might be compromised. The sooner they can start gathering information, the more of the important facts are likely to be actually captured and available. So you can see that information is a subset of facts. Evidence is then a subset of information. So evidence is the information which a court will actually agree to listen to. Not all information will necessarily meet the rules of evidence. Not all information will be able to be put in front of the court. Our rules of evidence help us to work out which information we are likely to be able to put in front of the court and which information we are not likely to be able to put in front of the court. That as simply as I can put it is the role of evidence law. You will find as we go through the semester that we divide our evidence into three types. The first type of evidence is oral evidence. Oral evidence is essentially a witness sitting in the witness box in the courtroom answering questions and providing testimony. Oral evidence, you'll get sick of hearing me say, is the gold standard of evidence in our legal system. Oral evidence is preferred to any other type of evidence that you can put before a court. So if you have a choice between using oral evidence and any other sort of evidence, you always go with oral evidence. The second form of evidence that is used commonly within our court is documentary evidence. Documentary evidence is anything, any medium in which data is stored. So that can be a piece of paper with writing on it, it could be a videotape, it could be a tape cassette, it could be... A computer that contains documentary evidence, it could be a label attached to the side of a jar. There are many different types of document and they are all regarded as documentary evidence. And so we will find that they have a separate set of rules for documentary evidence. The third type of evidence we call real evidence. Real evidence is stuff that the court has the opportunity to actually touch and experience and see and draw observations of on its own without requiring a witness to sit in the courtroom and actually explain those observations. You'll find that during the semester all of the sorts of evidence that we look at can be categorised into one of those three categories. Oral evidence, documentary evidence and real evidence. When you're looking at evidence through the semester there are four things that I'd like you to keep in mind. You see, when you put evidence together, you're almost always going to be doing it in the context of an adversarial situation. So it's going to be you versus some other team, and you're going to be using your evidence to try and prove your side of the case. They're going to be using their evidence to try and prove their side of the case. Now if you're any good, you're not just going to be using evidence to try and prove your side of the case. You're also going to be trying to use the rules of evidence to knock your opponent's evidence out. Because if you can knock their evidence out of contention, then the court is going to be very much more likely to find that your version of the facts is the preferable version of the facts. There are four real ways that you can knock out the other side's evidence. There are four real critical frames that you can put around evidence to decide whether or not it should be used and used well in the context of a case. The first is relevance. If you can show that the other side's evidence is completely irrelevant to the case at hand, it won't be used. Second is admissibility. Evidence is admissible if there is no rule of evidence that knocks it out. The rules of admissibility exist to say which evidence you can't bring into the courtroom. So if evidence is relevant, the second question you ask is, is it admissible? Or is there a rule of evidence that knocks that evidence out so that it can't be brought into the court? If it's both relevant and admissible, the third question to ask is, is it reliable? Or is there something about the evidence that says we really can't necessarily trust that this evidence is going to be useful? If the evidence is relevant, it's admissible. and it's reliable the final question you can ask is does it have any probative value probative value means does it prove anything does it actually demonstrate anything that that allows the court to conclude the specific facts are true If the other side's evidence is relevant, admissible, reliable and has high probative value, then it's likely that that evidence is going to carry the day and that the court is going to agree with their facts. Constantly during this course, especially during the experiential exercises, I would like you to be thinking critically about the evidence that you see and thinking about it critically in terms of those four frames of reference. The next thing that we need to cover are standards of proof. Now, most of you will have come across this material several times before during your law studies, but it's good just to revise them again for a few moments because they really are critically important to the study of evidence. There are essentially four standards of proof which we apply in our court system. The first one, and the one that everybody knows, is the criminal standard of proof. where matters must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Beyond reasonable doubt doesn't mean beyond all doubt. It just means beyond reasonable doubt. So you could always introduce doubt, unreasonable doubt, about anything. You could pretty much argue in relation to any criminal activity, the Martians did it. now we all know the martians didn't do it because we all know that there's no such thing as martians but if you were going to allow unreasonable doubt why couldn't you argue that the martians did it criminal standard of proof requires that any doubt be reasonable Second standard of proof that you will have run into is the civil standard of proof. The civil standard of proof is on the balance of probabilities. So if you must prove something to the civil standard of proof, you must prove that it is more likely than not that your fact exists. Now if you compare the criminal standard of proof and the civil standard of proof, You might suggest that to reach the criminal standard of proof you have to be at a 95 to 98% chance of success. You have to be 95 to 98% confident that the fact is true. For the civil standard of proof however you might only need to be at 55%. So there's a much lower requirement for certainty for the civil balance of probabilities, for the civil standard of proof which is a balance of probabilities. The third standard of proof is really a variation on the second. Some of you will no doubt have come across the High Court case Brigandshaw and Brigandshaw. If you look in the notes, I've put a link to the case so you can read it for yourself if you'd like. What the court said in Brigenshaw and Brigenshaw is that even in a civil case, the bigger the consequences of a fact, the more certain you must be. So if a fact is going to be introduced in a civil case and nothing terribly much is going to turn on that specific fact, then you probably only need to be 50% certain, 51% certain that the fact exists. if however the fact that's being put before the court is going to have dramatic consequences for a person if it is going to result for instance in them not having a claim of refugee status accepted and being sent back to another country where there's currently a war on then 51-52% is not going to cut it. You need to be much more certain. In some cases, consider for instance a family law case, somebody might be going into a family court and alleging that the other party has been guilty of quite serious criminal activity, for instance committing sexual crimes against children. in that situation even though you're in a civil court and there's only a civil judgment to be made the briganture standard would require that you meet virtually the criminal standard of proof before the court is going to be prepared to believe something with such massive consequences in that case so don't get trapped into thinking that in any civil case all you have to do is be 51-52% certain. In every case, it's best to be as certain as you possibly can because the Brigham Shaw standard will be applied by the court. The final standard is one that confuses a lot of people, so we'll take a couple of minutes to deal with it. It's called the Evidential Standard of Proof. The evidential standard of proof is only used in criminal trials and it only matters for the defence. Let's imagine that you have a client who's been charged with assault. You're defending them. It's the prosecution's job to prove beyond reasonable doubt that your client assaulted the victim, the alleged victim. Your side of the story is that your client assaulted that person in self-defence. If you can raise just enough doubt, just enough evidence to show that there was self-defence, doesn't that mean that you've introduced reasonable doubt? You see, if the criminal standard of proof requires that the court be 95% certain then on the defence side doesn't that mean you only need to introduce six or seven per cent worth of doubt and that's going to be enough to mean that the court says we now have reasonable doubt and therefore the accused person must be acquitted this is the evidential standard of proof the evidential standard of proof is where the defence introduces just enough evidence to raise a modicum of doubt about the guilt of the defendant once the evidential standard of proof has been met by the defence it's then the job of the prosecution to disprove that evidence beyond reasonable doubt. So in the example that I gave, if you're defending your client, you've introduced just enough evidence to show that it looks like they were acting in self-defense. It's then the job of the prosecution to bring in more evidence to show that you're talking rubbish, to show that in fact there's no case of self-defense, and they have to do that. to the criminal standard beyond reasonable doubt so there's those four standards of proof why are they important in the context of learning about evidence law well they set the goal posts if you're preparing evidence to try and prove certain facts to the court those four standards of proof tell you how much evidence you need to prepare with what level of certainty to make sure that the court believes the facts that you are trying to present in the context of your case having said that when we measure evidence we measure it in terms of quality not in terms of quantity The court will not appreciate you throwing a thousand pieces of evidence at it to try and make the same point over and over and over again just so that the judge gets it into his head that you're right. Providing ten witnesses who say the same thing is not actually going to prove any more than if you had just pulled in your best witness and gotten them to say that thing. This is why I've said in the slide here that one evidential diamond is worth more than a thousand evidential dollar bills. What you need to be thinking about in each case in order to meet those standards of proof is what is the best evidence that I've got available? What have I got in the evidence that's been presented to me by my client that is going to be the best way to present the facts as we allege they are to the court? Finally, there's the question of who needs to bother with all this evidence stuff anyway? when you go into court one side or another is going to have to actually demonstrate their assertions and meet those standards of proof that we spoke about just a few moments ago in a criminal case the onus of proof is almost always on the prosecution so it's the prosecution's job to assemble all of this evidence in fact the defendant in a criminal case has the right to silence they don't need to introduce any evidence at all If they wish to, they can rely on the prosecution being unable to produce enough evidence to meet that criminal standard of proof. And if the prosecution can't do that, the defendant doesn't need to say a word and they will get acquitted and they will walk free. In a civil case, the onus of proof is a bit more complicated. The basic rule of thumb is that they who assert must prove. So if you walk into a civil case, let's say it's a contract case, and you're going to argue that the people who fixed your car didn't do a good job, didn't do it properly. Well because you're making that assertion, you're the one who's going to have to introduce enough evidence to meet the civil standard of proof to show that they didn't fix your car properly. So whoever's trying to actually assert a fact is going to be responsible for proving that fact. So you'll be responsible for proving the facts that you allege, the other side will be responsible for proving the facts that they allege, and then the court will try to work out who's right. Now because this is law, and nothing's ever simple, there are some exceptions. First and foremost you will find that sometimes the statute says otherwise. Sometimes the statute will reverse the onus of proof. For example, the most common example that's given in criminal cases is a question about somebody's sanity or insanity. If you're going to mount a defence that says, that a client is not criminally responsible for conduct because they lacked mental competence at the time that the act was committed, you will bear the onus of proof because every person who comes before the court is presumed to be mentally competent until it's proven otherwise. So that's a good example of where the statute actually deliberately reverses the onus of proof. Second, where a criminal defendant is raising a statutory defence, they will usually have to prove, they will usually bear the onus of proof and usually to the civil standard of proof. So a general defence, sorry a statutory defence is a defence that is actually inserted into the statute. So the statute will say this is the crime, however it is a defence to this crime if the defendant can prove on the balance of probabilities that whatever the defence may be. So again this is where the statute intercedes and reverses the onus of proof and indicates that in this case the defence doesn't just have to meet the evidential standard of proof rather they have to meet the civil standard of proof in order to make good that defence. Now I realize that that discussion about onus of proof and standards of proof was quite complicated and we moved through it fairly quickly. This is one of those points where I'm going to say go and have a look at the notes and go and have a read of the textbook and then come back and have a listen to the lecture again and you'll probably find that it makes a lot more sense. Let's talk about the scheme of evidence law in Queensland. We said earlier that evidence law in Queensland primarily comes to us from the common law. You're going to find that as we go through the material this semester, I'm going to be talking to you a lot about very old cases and where I can I tell you the stories from those old cases and you'll very quickly pick up that I love these old cases. I love being able to cite. case law from the 17th and 18th century. I get a real kick out of it. But the reason I'm doing it is not simply because I get a real kick out of it. The reason I'm doing it is that most of our basic evidence law in Queensland does actually come from many of these Old English and Old Australian cases. We have a common law approach to evidence. In addition to that however, the Queensland Government introduced the Evidence Act 1977. The Parliament passed this in order to modify the common law in certain ways. And so as we go through the semester, sometimes I'll be referring you to provisions of the Evidence Act 1977 where the Queensland Parliament has quite deliberately changed the common law of evidence as it stood. However, as I've indicated on the slide there, the Evidence Act 1977 is a supplement, not a code. So what I mean by that is, if the Evidence Act was a code, you would be able to look at the Evidence Act and say, this is all I need to know about Queensland Evidence Law. Well, it doesn't work like that. In order to know everything that you need to know about Queensland Evidence Law, you're going to have to look at the Evidence Act and you're going to have to get your head around the common law. So we'll spend a lot of time this semester trying to do that. Having said that, even if you're practising in Queensland, you're going to also spend a lot of time working with other jurisdictions, in particular the Commonwealth jurisdiction. The Commonwealth, along with New South Wales initially, and then more recently the ACT, Tasmania and Victoria, have introduced what they refer to as the Uniform Evidence Acts. The Uniform Evidence Acts are harmonised evidence legislation between all of those jurisdictions. Basically what they did was they took the Australian Law Reform Commission and over a period of about 10 years they looked at evidence law from the ground up. And they wrote evidence acts which actually are an evidential code. So these evidence acts say everything that the Commonwealth Parliament thought needed to be said about evidence in 1995. So this is the first evidence that they wrote. There have been a layer of High Court precedents which sit over the top of the Evidence Act since then in the same way that any piece of legislation gets interpreted by the courts but essentially we can regard the Uniform Evidence Acts as a code. So it's very important at any point in time that you be thinking about which jurisdiction you're practising in. If you're practising in the Commonwealth jurisdiction, you're going to need to apply the Uniform Evidence Act. So you'll be looking at the Evidence Act 1995 Commonwealth. If however you're practising in Queensland jurisdiction, you're going to be operating under the Common Law as modified by the Evidence Act 1977. During this semester our focus is going to be Queensland law. However, what we will do is regularly contrast the law in Queensland with the law in the Uniform Evidence Act states. So you'll come out at the end of the semester with a very good understanding of evidence law in Queensland and then quite a good understanding of the Uniform Evidence Acts applying in the Commonwealth and other states. If you've got the PowerPoint slides open in front of you, you'll see that the next couple of slides are an introduction to formal logic. I'm not going to go through that material in the podcast. There's a reading associated with this and the slides, I think, are fairly self-evident. For a lot of you, this is probably your first introduction to formal logic. Unfortunately, they don't teach formal logic in school very commonly these days, and so a lot of people come into the study of law without having any real understanding of how to construct an argument. You learn it in general life, but you don't necessarily learn the formal process of establishing premises and knitting them together to form a conclusion and avoiding contradictions. i am not going to assess anything to do with formal logic what i am going to do is encourage you to take a look at that material because i think that the more you actually learn about the formalized process of logic The more you will understand not only about the law in general, but the more you will understand about how you need to establish evidence to support each of the premises that you're trying to argue, so that the court is led inevitably to the conclusion that you are right and your opponent is wrong. So have a look at that material and think about it for yourself. Finally, I want to speak very briefly about the first of our experiential exercises. We're going to start with a fun one. Some of you, no doubt, will already be well acquainted with the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. For those of you who share my sense of humour, you probably split your sides laughing every time you watch the movie. To those of you who don't share my sense of humour, I humbly apologise, but I'm going to ask you to watch this clip anyway. I want you to watch it before you do any of the readings. I want you to really just try and let the scene wash over you and start to think not just about the funny stuff, but think about... What are we seeing here in terms of the use of evidence? What different pieces of evidence are the peasants putting in front of Sir Bevedere? And how is he responding to that? Where does the onus of proof lie? What types of evidence and what probative value is each piece of evidence being given? The whole thing, of course, because we are talking about Monty Python, becomes completely absurd by the end of the scene. But that's kind of the fun bit. I hope you enjoy it and I'm looking forward to the rest of the show. This lecture series continuing with topic 2.