Particular Intentions": The Hillmon Case and the Supreme Court (original) (raw)
The case ofMutual Life Insurance Company v. Hillmon is one of the most influential decisions in the law of evidence. Decided by the Supreme Court in 1892, it invented an exception to the hearsay rle for statements encompassing the intentions of the declarant. But this exception seems not to rest on anyplausible theory of the categorical reliability ofsuch statements. This article suggests that the case turned instead on the Court's attachment to a particular narrative about the events that gave rise to the case, events that produced a corpse of disputed identity. The author's investigations into newspaper archives and the original case documents make the case for a different account, and propose that this important rule of evidence may have grown out ofa historical error, committed by a Court too eager to narrate an attractive story. Every lawsuit begins and ends as a story, and sometimes it's even a really ripping tale, teeming with plot, character, and suspense. But the law's insistence on distillation and abstraction ensures that ordinarily a casual student of the lawsuit, reading an appellate opinion, can catch only fleeting and sometimes misleading glimpses of the story. The narrative movement in legal scholarship has attempted, among its other projects, to excavate some of the stories thus concealed.' This article gives an account of one such undertaking, and its unexpected discovery that the narrative urge and an inauthentic document-a fake-may have made a significant and ironic contribution to the evolution of the law of evidence. In the spring of 1879, a young Kansas woman named Sallie Hillmon 2 filed claims against the policies that three insurance companies had issued on the life of
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