What you need to know about the Revised Rules on Evidence

No less than 26th Supreme Court Chief Justice Diosdado M. Peralta and Court of Appeals Associate Justice Eduardo B. Peralta, Jr. wrote the much-awaited book titled “Insights on Evidence”, which contains the most updated Supreme Court revisions on the Philippines’ rules on evidence.

 

In his foreword for the book, Justice Romeo J. Callejo, Sr., Vice-Chancellor of the Philippine Judicial Academy (PHILJA), said that this book “aims to highlight the salient points of the 2019 Rules on Evidence, reconcile its provisions with those of the retained rules, and address the gaps or inconsistencies that might result in the application of the new procedural rules.” 

 

This latest edition will be “even more comprehensive, given the recent approval of the 2019 Proposed Amendments to the Revised Rules on Evidence,” he added.

 

Highlighting the indispensable role of the rules on evidence in insuring “a better quality of justice for its various rules prevent the tampering of truth” so that “its mastery by our arbiters of justice is a must for its wrong application is certain to result in failure of justice,” former Chief Justice Reynato S. Puno, who initiated back in 2008 the proposed amendments to the Revised Rules on Evidence, lauded the book for having drawn on the “wisdom of the most learned commentators on the law on evidence like McCormick, Mueller, Kirkpatrick, Lempert, Saltzburg, and others.”

                                         Justice Eduardo Peralta, Jr.

 

Chief Justice Peralta said he is grateful and appreciative of his co-author, Justice Eduardo Peralta, Jr. “for allowing him to make a humble contribution to his opus: Perspectives of Evidence,” describing him as “one of the leading lights and a credible authority in the intricacies of remedial law.”

 

                                Supreme Court Justice Diosdado Peralta

For his part, Justice Eduardo Peralta, Jr. said that “to collaborate with no less than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in spurring a project on the new Rules on Evidence, following promulgation by the Supreme Court of A.M. No. 19-08-15-SC on October 8, 2019 effective May 1, 2020, was definitely a daunting task.”

 

He adds: “With invocation of divine intercession and focus amidst the global pandemic since December 2019, the product labelled Insights on Evidence finally materialized.”