LEGAL EVIDENCE.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXII, Issue 7602, 26 November 1886, Page 3

LEGAL EVIDENCE.

Men of business are often put out by the technical rules as to evidence which govern the proceedings of Courts of law. It is not uncommon for a trader to have a clear coso morally, as it were, and yet to be without that legal proof upon which alone his claim can bo enforced.. The rules of legal evidence are, however, simple common sense, as everyone will admit who looks at them fairly. Tims it is a rule that secondary evidence cannot be heard if primary evidence can be obtained, and that hearsay is not admissible. For this reason, copies of documents cannot bo received until the absence of "the original is accounted for, and that what A told B cannot be retailed by B at secondhand. Nor will writing, letters, and the like speak for themselves, as many people seem to think they will, but ' they must be proved by someone to whom the party's writing is known. It is obvious that a trader's own books cannot be evidence in Ins favor, although they are often offered as such by County Court suitors, and it is equally clear that tho sending a man an account or invoice for goods which he does not repudiate is of itself no proof that he has ever had the goods, or is liable to pay for them. These points as to evidence are of much practical importance, as was shown tho other day in a curious ease that was taken up to the Hisht Court at Home upon appeal from a County Court, in Tomson v. Davis. The plaintiff, a brewer, sued the defendant for beer alleged to have been supplied to him in ISBO. The plaintiffs case was that this had been delivered to the defendant at a house he then kept in the autumn of that year; that the defendant had sold the business directly after, and had disappeared, so that for over five years the plaintiff could not find him. "When the case came on before the County Court Judge, the brewer was called upon to prove his claim. He had no order in writing, nor any evidence of a verbal order, while he could not prove delivery of the beer, because his carter at that time had since gono to Canada. All he could prove was sending the invoice or account, and the fact that the defendant had paid for former deliveries. Of course this came to nothing, and so he was non-suited in the County Court, a decision that the High Court supported. The result is that the brewer failed all round, tho Court holding that he should have shown greater diligence, though how this was to bo done they did not explain, and deciding that he had given no legal evidence of the sale.