Revalancy: Research On The Fundamental Issues

As a foundational role in the field of evidence law, Relevancy has been at the core among the Anglo-American legal system. Influenced by different legal opinions and lawsuit mode, legislation and practice for relevancy present obvious differences in different legal systems. Legislators of China have never attached importance to the concept of relevancy, which leads to restriction of its due value in practice for quite a long time. This paper analyses certain foundational issues including the connotation of relevancy, the character and some influencing factors of it and puts forward certain academic opinions and legislative proposals based on the research situation and legislation in China. This paper consists of four parts which are introduction, body, conclusion and references. Opinions for this paper are stated as follows:The first part starts from the definition and connotation of revelancy. With various ideas among scholars all over the world, this paper establishes revelancy's substantive characteristics as well as intrinsic value rather than its surficial definition as a matter of priority.The second part compares relevance legislation and research in Anglo-American Legal System with that in the Continental Law System. Based on diversities between two systems, the paper proposes and analyses three main reasons that caused these differences, thats are, the structure of the court, the ways of court trial and the mode of lawsuit.The third part studies three important factors that must be taken into account in revelancy judgement. This paper first investigates"logic"and"experience"as two relative concepts, and then pays attention to"scientific evidence"which has been developing rapidly since several years ago.The fourth part turns to China's legislative situation in revelancy area. On the basis of the interpretion above, this paper observes the probability and rationality revelancy appears in China's evidence law and makes an expectation for new trend of system construction for revelancy in the future.