judicial notice
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 301 U.S. 292 - Ohio Bell Telephone Co. v. Public Utilities Commission · 1937Most cited · 1,406 citing opinions
Courts take judicial notice of matters of common knowledge. They take judicial notice that there has been a depression, and that a decline of market values is one of its concomitants. How great the decline has been for this industry or that, for one material or another, in this year or the next, can be known only to the experts, who may even differ among themselves. Moreover, notice, even when taken, has no other effect than to relieve one of the parties to a controversy of the burden of resorting to the usual forms of evidence. 'It does not mean that the opponent is prevented from disputing the matter by evidence if he believes it disputable.
How the Supreme Court has restated “judicial notice”
Each Supreme Court definition of “judicial notice,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “judicial notice”
Court decisions citing the 4 opinions that defined “judicial notice” — 1,728 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 4 definitions, chronological · 1850–1937
- ORIGINAL
the statement of facts in this case describes the usual course of the great inland commerce by which the larger part of the agricultural productions of the valley of the Mississippi find their way to a market. It has existed long enough to assume a regular form of dealing, and it embraces such a wide extent of territory, and is of such general importance, that its ordinary course and usages are now publicly known and understood; and it is the duty of the court to recognize them, as it judicially recognizes the general and established usages of trade on the ocean.
inland trade usage
whenever a question arises in a court of law of the existence of a statute, or of the time when a statute took effect, or of the precise terms of a statute, the judges who are called upon to decide it, have a right to resort to any source of information which in its nature is capable of conveying to the judicial mind a clear and satisfactory answer to such question; always seeking first for that which in its nature is most appropriate, unless the positive law has enacted a different rule
of statutes
To say that a court will take judicial notice of a fact, whether it be an event or a custom or a law of some other government, is merely another way of saying that the usual forms of evidence will be dispensed with if knowledge of the fact can be otherwise acquired.