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Section 15 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 provided: [A]ll the said courts of the United States, shall have power in the trial of actions at law, on motion and due notice thereof being given, to require the parties to produce books or writings in their possession or power, which contain evidence pertinent to the issue, in cases and under circumstances where they might be compelled to produce the ...
Discovery, in the law of common law jurisdictions, is a phase of pretrial procedure in a lawsuit in which each party, through the law of civil procedure, can obtain evidence from other parties. This is by means of methods of discovery such as interrogatories , requests for production of documents , requests for admissions and depositions .
Common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law primarily developed through judicial decisions rather than statutes. [2] [3] Although common law may incorporate certain statutes, it is largely based on precedent—judicial rulings made in previous similar cases. [4]
Under common law, public-interest privilege prevents the compulsory disclosure of documents or information which is against the public interest. There is a balance between public interests- if the public interest in secrecy is greater than the public interest in disclosure, it will be privileged.
Until 1938, federal courts in the United States followed the doctrine set forth in the 1842 case of Swift v.Tyson. [2] In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court held that federal courts hearing cases brought under their diversity jurisdiction (allowing them to hear cases between parties from different U.S. states) had to apply the statutory law of the states, but not the common law developed by ...
Attorney–client privilege or lawyer–client privilege is the common law doctrine of legal professional privilege in the United States. Attorney–client privilege is "[a] client's right to refuse to disclose and to prevent any other person from disclosing confidential communications between the client and the attorney."
In common law jurisdictions and some civil law jurisdictions, legal professional privilege protects all communications between a professional legal adviser (a solicitor, barrister or attorney) and his or her clients from being disclosed without the permission of the client. The privilege is that of the client and not that of the lawyer.
[4] [page needed] [5] [6] [7] Congress has repeatedly resisted or failed to pass a law that generally outlaws disclosing classified information. Most espionage law criminalizes only national defense information; only a jury can decide if a given document meets that criterion, and judges have repeatedly said that being "classified" does not ...