What Is Evidence?
Every case that comes before a court of law has a fact/story behind it. Facts out of
which cases arise keeps happening in the ordinary course of life. The primary
objective of any Judicial System, irrespective of any state is to administer justice and
protect the rights of the citizens. For administering justice, every judicial system has
to consider the facts of the cases and has to extract the correct facts for complete
justice; and there the importance of procedural law comes into existence. The law of
evidence act does not affect the substantive rights of parties, but only lays down the
law for facilitating the course of justice. The evidence acts laid down the rules of
evidence for the purpose of guidance of the courts it is a procedural law which
provides, inter alia, how a fact to be proved.
Ideally, when a judge receives a case, he knows nothing about the facts of the
particular case. He just knows that two parties have a dispute and have come to
settle it before him. Since he has no idea of what really happened, the onus is on
both sides to establish the facts of the case. The only way for parties to establish
what really happened is through the tendering of evidence.
Evidence can be described as the building blocks which the parties use to repaint a
picture of what happened between them. In an inquisitorial system of justice, the
judge is at liberty to come off his high horse in an attempt to understand the facts
that transpired between the parties.
The Law of Evidence is a significant part of any branch of the judicial system
irrespective of any nation, which means the role of evidence is very important statute
in every country. The lawyers have to discover what transpired and bring evidence of
what happened before the court. The judge weighs the evidence and establishes the
facts from the more established piece(s) of evidence.
The word „evidence “is derived from the Latin word evider, which means to
show clearly; to make clear to the sight ; to discover clearly; to make plainly certain
; to ascertain ;to prove. So evidence is about proving or disproving facts in issue , the
means by which such facts come to be proved or disproved.
The Scope of the Law of Evidence
The Law of Evidence is rightly categorised under adjectival law. This is due to the
fact that the law of evidence concerns itself with the procedure that parties have to
follow in order to resolve their legal issues. One of the numerous classifications of
law is the classification between substantive and adjectival/procedural law.
