I was reading something the other day when Onionhead came to mind. I hadn’t thought about him since law school yet suddenly there was his memory; and along with it both an insight into the foundation of the rules of evidence and a reminder that youth is wasted on the young—my considerably less than intense commitment to studying during law school being but one example of the latter. Onionhead, you see, was the nickname given a war criminal said by American G.I.s to have been a particularly vicious POW camp commandant. My Evidence professor at Baylor, Hulen D. Wendorf, had been involved the prosecution of Japanese war crimes after World War II and he used the case of Onionhead to launch a discussion about how evidentiary rules might be synthesized when parties with differing legal traditions sit down to craft a new set of rules.

Thirty years ago I didn’t care about the philosophical underpinnings of Evidence and I certainly didn’t care about what became of Onionhead. Obviously someone had already figured out why we have rules and someone had already figured out what they ought to be. That’s why Evidence was supposed to be an easy class. We learned the rules and then, for the final exam, memorized some examples of what happens when the rules are silent, when they overlap and when they conflict. We saved those brain cells that survived the weekends for the nailing-Jell-O-to-the-wall exercise that was understanding, or at least attempting to understand, substantive due process. Really, I wondered more than once why Evidence was even a class.

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