ABSTRACT
In 1892, a Washington, D.C.–based attorney named George E. Harris published a four-hundred-some-odd-page Treatise on the Law of Identification. 1 While there are many famous treatises on the law of evidence and on medico-legal matters more generally, Harris’s appears to be the only nineteenth-century American legal treatise specifically on the law of identification. Harris seemed aware of this, as he subtitled his work A Separate Branch of the Law of Evidence. Indeed, Aubrey Moriarty, the British author of short pamphlet on the subject, noted that identification was “a subject of considerable difficulty, and which has hitherto received less attention, than from its importance, it would seem to merit. I have been unable to discover any substantive Essay or Treatise in any modern language upon the subject.” 2 Moriarty went on to claim that “[i]n the whole range of judicial inquiry there is notoriously no class of cases with which courts of justice have so much difficulty dealing” and that
[i]t is only in reference to this class of cases that large sections of society fling aside their habitual reverence for the law, and those entrusted with its administration, and refuse to subordinate their personal convictions to the judgments of judges or the findings of juries. 3
