Description:

The conference will examine the challenges of law reform in third world countries with a particular focus on reform movements concerning the law of evidence in Tanzania and China (and how good a model the FRE may be). The conference thus will, as its title suggests, examine the conceptual foundations of the field of evidence and their implications for drafting rules or the law of evidence for quite different social and political contexts. The conference participants will include experts in the field of evidence from across the world, and in addition will have delegations of key actors from Tanzania and China. In Tanzania, the reform movement has progressed to the point that a Proposed Evidence Act has been drafted for presentation to Parliament by a Team under the supervision of Professor Ronald J. Allen of Northwestern University and in consultation with one of the co-sponsors of the conference, the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania. In China, the Supreme People’s Court has created a National Research Project on the Law of Evidence that will use as its starting point the Uniform Provisions of Evidence of the People’s Court drafted by Faculty of the other co-sponsor of the conference, ZhengFa University (CUPL).