October 16, 2025
Child welfare records maintained by a department of social services (DSS) contain sensitive information that parties in various proceedings are often interested in seeing. A complex web of state and […]
September 3, 2025
In light of the recent Court of Appeals opinion State v. Moore, this post is a follow-up to the 2018 blog post State v. Fincher: No Foundation Required for DRE […]
July 24, 2025
Special thanks to Sloan Godbey, Summer Law Fellow at UNC SOG, for their significant contributions to this post. In March of last year, I did a thorough review of North […]
April 24, 2025
A common evidence question that arises is how to properly authenticate digital communications. We have written on the topic in several blogs: How Can a Party Show Authorship of a […]
March 25, 2024
Video evidence authentication has received a fair amount of treatment on this blog. The topic remains an area of practical significance given the prevalence of video evidence in criminal trials […]
January 24, 2024
My colleague, Phil Dixon, blogged about the Court of Appeals’ decision in State v. Joyner, 284 N.C. App. 681 (2022), here. In Joyner, the court ruled that the State did […]
May 1, 2023
In my last post, I wrote about how a party might authenticate a Facebook direct message or other text-based electronic communication. That post focused on how the proponent of the […]
December 19, 2022
The Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment generally guarantees a criminal defendant the right to confront and cross-examine his accusers in person. If a witness was available for an earlier […]
March 12, 2020
My colleagues and predecessors here at the School of Government have written about video evidence many times over the years, summarizing the basic rules and significant cases in posts available […]
January 14, 2020
In this blog post from 2012, Professor Jessica Smith summarized Rules of Evidence 101 and 1101, which together dictate that the rules of evidence apply to “all actions and proceedings […]