The first edition of Evidence and the Adversarial Process was published in 1992. Since then the law of evidence has undergone many significant changes, for example to the right to silence, the rules on disclosure, corroboration and the treatment of child witnesses. Despite substantial revision of the original text, the themes of the first edition are retained: to what extent is the content of the law of evidence dictated by the adversarial form of trial, and is it worth retaining? Do the rules of evidence operate in the interests of justice? The new edition is designed not only to interest readers already conversant with the law of evidence but to be used as a text by law teachers interested in a more discursive approach than that employed by traditional evidence textbooks. To this end, it contains more explanatory material than the first edition, and should be entirely comprehensible to the novice. The objective is to provide a self-contained but critical account of the manner in which cases are tried in England and Wales. As such it is ideal for students of law studying for university and professional examinations.

Courts are constantly required to know how people think. They may have to decide what a specific person was thinking on a past occasion; how others would have reacted to a particular situation; or whether a witness is telling the truth. Be they judges, jurors or magistrates, the law demands they penetrate human consciousness. This book questions whether the arm-chair psychology' operated by fact-finders, and indeed the law itself, in its treatment of the fact-finders, bears any resemblance to the knowledge derived from psychological research. Comparing psychological theory with court verdicts in both civil and criminal contexts, it assesses where the separation between law and science is most acute, and most dangerous.