Evid. Code, § 1521 · Article 1. Proof of the Content of a Writing
Evid. Code, § 1521
Text — As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
(a) The content of a writing may be proved by otherwise admissible secondary evidence. The court shall exclude secondary evidence of the content of writing if the court determines either of the following:
(1) A genuine dispute exists concerning material terms of the writing and justice requires the exclusion.
(2) Admission of the secondary evidence would be unfair.
(b) Nothing in this section makes admissible oral testimony to prove the content of a writing if the testimony is inadmissible under Section 1523 (oral testimony of the content of a writing).
(c) Nothing in this section excuses compliance with Section 1401 (authentication).
(d) This section shall be known as the “Secondary Evidence Rule.”
Notes and commentary — not statutory text
History
Added by Stats. 1998, Ch. 100, Sec. 2. Effective January 1, 1999.
Source of truth
- Edition
- As published in the Legislative Counsel's database, tables dated October 18, 2026 (pubinfo_2025.zip)
- Official file
- https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=EVID§ionNum=1521.
- Text hash
- sha256 82f03cc7e87a894dd578586fb52c56db5eb56c7e030134c10f296dfaf529c134
- Composed by
- compose_ca.py 2026-10-22: the Legislative Counsel's CAML content files read by a tokenizer (caml_readers.reader_a); an independent xml.etree reading (caml_readers.reader_b) agrees on every section
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