Searching for Truth in the American Law of Evidence and Proof

The ideology of the trial process puts discovery of truthat center stage. This is made clear by the language ofFederal Rule of Evidence 102, upon which New GeorgiaRule of Evidence 24-1-1 is obviously based. Both of theserules make the ascertainment of truth one of the two goalsof the trial (just determination being the other). However,the term truth has been used in many ways in manydifferent contexts and traditions. What notion of truth didthe drafters have in mind?This Article answers that question by reference to whathas come to be known as the standard model of the trial,which is almost certainly what the drafters had in mindwhen invoking truth. In the tradition of the standardmodel, that truth is truth about facts, usually conceivedof as details of the physical world provable by empiricalevidence. However, even restricting the notion of truth tofactual truth, many issues remain, particularly since thereare many varieties of such facts that stand as ultimate issues under various substantive law doctrines. In thesecond half of this Article, I put forth a preliminaryapproach to a taxonomy of the law\u27s facts