We shared the quotation about cross-examination ("greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth"), which originates with John Henry Wigmore (former dean of Northwestern Law and the leading early-20th-century evidence scholar). But he went further with it, writing in 1911:
the final establishment of the right of cross-examination by counsel, at the beginning of the 1700s, gave to our law of evidence the distinction of possessing the most efficacious expedient ever invented for the extraction of truth (although, to be sure, like torture, — that great instrument of the continental system, — it is almost equally powerful for the creation of false impressions.
As with much of what we cover in this class (or frankly any other), it goes both ways.
