Nov. 4, 2025
Behind the magic of self-authentication
Self-authentication, a rarely used evidentiary rule, does not operate as announced -- and untangling it shows something about how courts work.
Curtis E.A. Karnow
Judge (ret.)
Judge Karnow is author of "Litigation in Practice" (2017) and current co-author of Weil & Brown et al., "California Practice Guide: Civil Procedure Before Trial" (Rutter).
For most of us trial lawyers and judges, the underlying structure of the law shows itself not in the big case -- say, some grand constitutional shift or the end of standing for a claim -- but in the small details. The work we do every day -- in the next brief, argument, mundane court order -- is where the law happens. If the law doesn't work there, it doesn't work anywhere. To coin a phrase: the world in a grain of sand.
Other aspects of interest are doc...
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