The “legal system” is concerned, above all else, that citizens regard its workings as legitimate, The appearance of inevitability promotes the sense of legitimacy, and any procedures that appear arbitrary interfere with it. Thus, the law would exclude all “hearsay within hearsay” before it would impose a three-level limit. Statistical evidence might show that three levels is optimal (or that some other cutoff is), but the provision’s artificiality is patent. “I was treated unjustly because my evidence consisted of four levels of hearsay” sounds unjust because “arbitrary” limitations denude the law of evidence of the sense that it’s natural.
That critique might sound good in theory, but I think it falls flat in practice. Hearsay is a rule with more than 30 exceptions, many of which seem quite technical and arbitrary. But I have seen no evidence that the public views legal systems that employ this sort of convoluted hearsay regime as less legitimate than legal systems that take a more naturalistic, Benthamite approach.
In practice, even laypeople who are participating in trials don’t really see the doctrine that lies beneath the surface of evidentiary rulings, so I doubt they form their judgments of the system’s legitimacy based on such details.
The “legal system” is concerned, above all else, that citizens regard its workings as legitimate, The appearance of inevitability promotes the sense of legitimacy, and any procedures that appear arbitrary interfere with it. Thus, the law would exclude all “hearsay within hearsay” before it would impose a three-level limit. Statistical evidence might show that three levels is optimal (or that some other cutoff is), but the provision’s artificiality is patent. “I was treated unjustly because my evidence consisted of four levels of hearsay” sounds unjust because “arbitrary” limitations denude the law of evidence of the sense that it’s natural.
That critique might sound good in theory, but I think it falls flat in practice. Hearsay is a rule with more than 30 exceptions, many of which seem quite technical and arbitrary. But I have seen no evidence that the public views legal systems that employ this sort of convoluted hearsay regime as less legitimate than legal systems that take a more naturalistic, Benthamite approach.
In practice, even laypeople who are participating in trials don’t really see the doctrine that lies beneath the surface of evidentiary rulings, so I doubt they form their judgments of the system’s legitimacy based on such details.