Hearsay

Hearsay is an out-of court statement, by someone other than the witness testifying, admitted to prove the truth of what was asserted in the statement. Literally it comes from "hear it said," which is inherently unreliable as to the truth what was supposedly said. Gossip is a type of hearsay. The concept is best thought of as codifying the unreliability of secondary or tertiary knowledge.

Hearsay is typically excluded from legal proceedings due to its lack of reliability for reasons including the following:

• the speaker of the hearsay may have been uninformed
• the speaker of the hearsay may have been lying, without providing the court an attempt to check against the alleged declarant

There are limited exceptions that do allow the admission of hearsay as evidence when special circumstances make the hearsay more reliable than usual. These exceptions include, for example:

• admissions against one's own interest (in the federal rules, this is not considered hearsay at all)
• dying words