Legal Definition and Related Resources of Admissible Evidence

evidence which, by the rules of evidence can be admitted in court ; that which is necessary to be received in court as being relevant to decide the issues before the court; evidence of such a character that the court is bound to allow it to be adduced.

Browse or run a search for Admissible Evidence in the American Encyclopedia of Law, the Asian Encyclopedia of Law, the European Encyclopedia of Law, the UK Encyclopedia of Law or the Latin American and Spanish Encyclopedia of Law.

Admissible Evidence in Historical Law

You might be interested in the historical meaning of this term. Browse or search for Admissible Evidence in Historical Law in the Encyclopedia of Law.

Search for legal acronyms and/or abbreviations containing Admissible Evidence in the Legal Abbreviations and Acronyms Dictionary.

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Evidence that a trial court may receive in deciding the case. Various… (Read more)

What does Admissible evidence mean in American Law?

The definition of Admissible evidence in the law of the United States, as defined by the lexicographer Arthur Leff in his legal dictionary is:

Evidence which, when offered in any legal proceeding, may properly be heard and considered by the trier of fact. Why, one might ask, should any proffered evidence ever be not admissible? There are several general grounds.

First, some evidence is said to be “irrelevant,” i.e., to have no bearing upon the existence of any fact at issue in the proceeding. It is rare, however, that any evidence actually offered has no such bearing; it is almost always possible to construct a chain of inference eventually connecting the offered evidence to some issue in the case. Hence, a ruling that certain evidence is “irrelevant” ordinarily means one of two other things. A ruling that certain evidence is irrelevant is often a ruling about the substantive law of the case. For instance, if a party offers evidence that the defendant orally warranted certain goods, but the substantive law has it that a written disclaimer of warranty defeats all earlier oral warranties, when the judge refuses to admit testimony about the oral warranty, he is merely announcing and applying

the substantive law.

By “irrelevant,” however, the judge may really mean that while the proffered evidence does to some substantial extent make the truth or falsity of an issue in the case [more] or less probable, it still, for one reason or another, should not be admitted, e.g., that it is excessively time-consuming to hear this evidence on the issue, given its unimportance to the overall case, or that the evidence offered will, if admitted, unavoidably carry with it other facts which are highly prejudicial but under the substantive law not at all relevant to the case (e.g., that the defendant in an automobile-tort case is filthy rich). This meaning of “irrelevant” is sometimes expressed by the term “immaterial,” but the usage is really quite fluid, and “immaterial” may also be used to mean essentially the same as “irrelevant” in its broadest reach.

Sometimes, however, evidence which is clearly both relevant and material is still ruled inadmissible because of some other rule [or] policy of the law. The most obvious example involves evidentiary privileges, e.g., the privilege of a party to prevent his attorney from testifying as to matters discussed between them. (See attorney and client privilege.) It is frequently the case, of course, that the attorney’s testimony would be highly relevant and material, often dispositive, but the law considers the sanctity of the attorney-client relationship sufficiently important to outweigh the loss of good evidence entailed by recognizing the privilege. The same is true of hearsay. This last kind of inadmissible evidence is sometimes called “incompetent evidence,” but once again the usage is not at all stabilized, and when an attorney objects to evidence as “incompetent” he may just be saying “I don’t want it in, but I’m not quite able instantly to articulate now the grounds why.” Indeed, an attorney at a trial will often be heard to say “objection, your Honor; the evidence is incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial,” when, in default of being able to think of a more precise ground (e.g., hearsay, or privilege), he just wants to touch all bases. In any event, the Federal courts (mainly in the Federal Rules of Evidence) and all state courts have elaborate rules (usually at least partly codified) about what evidence is “admissible evidence.”

Meaning of Admissible Evidence in the U.S. Legal System

Definition of Admissible Evidence published by the National Association for Court Management: Evidence that can be legally and properly introduced in a civil or criminal trial.

Meaning of Admissible Evidence

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