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me justice, and either to allow my claim, or to assign some satisfactory reasons why it should not be established.” What, I say, would be the answer to this fine harangue? the claimant would be turned out of court, and his paper immediately flung after him.
In that court, as in all other courts, it is an established rule that the best evidence the nature of the case will admit of, shall always be required,[1] if possible to be had; but, if not possible, then the best evidence that can be had shall be allowed: “for, if it be found (says Sir William Blackstone) that there is any better evidence existing than is produced, the very not producing it is a
- ↑ “The design of the law is to come to rigid demonstration in matters of right; and there can be no demonstration of a fact without the best evidence that the nature of the thing is capable of: less evidence doth but create suspicion and surmise, and does not leave a man the entire satisfaction that arises from demonstration; for if it be plainly seen in the nature of the transaction that there is some more evidence that doth not appear, the very not producing it is a presumption that it would have detected something more than appears already, and therefore the mind does not acquiesce in any thing lower than the utmost evidence the fact is capable of.”
Gilbert’s Law of Evidence, p. 5.
