Research And Application Of American Character Evidence

The rule of character evidence is originated in the United Kingdom,which is one of the most controversial and complicated rules of evidencelaw in the legislation of Anglo-American legal systems countries andpossesses an important part in those countries. It takes the exclusionas a principle but application as exception, which have been much moremature with continuous development and improvement through the longperiod of judicial practice. The value of the rule of character evidenceis to promote the use of character evidence systematic, transparent, avoidthe absence and confusion of character evidence in the procedural law,avoid negative negate its value,and to avoid its negative and activeinfluence to the person in litigation, to improve the judge judgingefficiency, fairness and accuracy.On the contrary, character evidence in civil law countries are moremarginalized with little rules and provisions of implementation, due toits different litigation model and theory. In judicial practice,character evidence applies with no legal basis but mainly rely on thejudges’ discretion. In China, character evidence also did not get itsdue attention, with little scholars researching in this field especiallyin civil litigation field. Generally, scholars tended to neglect oroverall exclude, and make it used by discretion of the judge; actually,the appearance and use of character evidence in the field of justice isnot fade away and stagnated due to its absence in legislative circles.Whether to use character evidence is an unavoidable problem in judicialpractice. This paper aims to sort out, and build the initial frameworksuitable for China’s civil action character evidence rules with theperspective of civil litigation, learning from the more mature character evidence in common law countries, and combined with China’s nationalconditions.This paper is divided into four parts. The first part is an overviewof the character evidence, which introduces and explains the definitionof character evidence, relative concepts as well as its classification,and analyzed the contact and different between habits evidence andcharacter evidence, to show a clearer understanding of the characterevidence. The second part specifically interprets reputation evidence,opinion evidence and specific behavioral event respectively with thebackground of the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence in legislative, judicialpractice in common law countries. The third part is the core content ofthis paper, which is mainly based on various rules of the United StatesFederal Rules of Evidence. The association rule、principle rule、as wellas admissibility rules are the main content， which focus on theintroduction and analysis of tendentious character evidence, non-tendentious character evidence,"other acts", substantive controversialcharacter evidence, witnesses, character evidence relating sexualassault in civil proceedings, it also analysis the similar and differentfrom those in the field of criminal procedure, to demonstrates the useof character evidence rules in the United States clearly. The last partdiscusses the necessity and feasibility of the establishment of civilcharacter evidence, and tends to construct our own rule of characterevidence by researching and learning from American Character Evidence andcombined with China’s specific national conditions.