date

8 April 1805 Evidence Securities
8 April 1805

Evidence

Securities

Ch. Procedure Technical

''. Allegation is Evidence

This rule audi alterem partem[?] [...?] is commonly regarded /spoken/ as one /among/ the deepest laid parts of the foundations of justice. The violation of it the refusal to hear on either side an arrangement by which the advantage of a hearing is refused to either side, is commonly regarded as one of the most flagrant, if not exclusively the most flagrant, of all violations of justice /the modifications /forms/ of injustice/. Examined closely /more narrowly/ it will however be found to be no more than a sort of minor and subordinate /narrower/ injustice, included in that mode /feature/ of procedure by which the technical system is distinguished from the natural. After the one side /plaintiff/ has been heard, the other /defendant/ should be heard likewise - why? because should the plaintiff's information /evidence furnished by the plaintiff/ be false, there is nothing /nobody/ to correct it: should it be incompleat, there is nobody to compleat it: and in either case /event/, deception on the part of the Judge, and from /through/ deception misdecision may be the certain consequence. True: in all this there is nothing but what may be, and is indeed but too apt to be. Still however in this case misdecision is /would be/ far from certain, and were the error /practice/ universal would be far from constant. It may be, on the plaintiff's side there would be nothing but truth: it is not natural, because it is not needful, at least when the amount of /value in/ demand is limited that there should be any thing but truth, or that any material part of the truth should be withholden, where the plaintiff happens to be in the right; a state of things which, through causes foreign to the present purpose, may be expected to be verified in perhaps nineteen instances out of twenty instances. Again: though the information furnished by the plaintiff should be at [...?] incompleat and false deception on the part of the Judge is by no means the certain or the constant consequence. It may be that of what is false, he derives the falsity: and from what is furnished, though incompleat, his good understanding, in the way of inference, supplies the rest. But,
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