Understanding Federal Rule of Evidence 104(b) On Building Walls and Missing Bricks.

The article explores the meaning and practical challenges of Federal Rule of Evidence 104(b), arguing that the rule's dense language makes conditional relevance harder to understand. Topics include the scholarly critique that nearly all evidence is conditionally relevant because its significance always depends on other facts, the debate over what Rule 104(b)'s first sentence actually means and whether it means anything coherent at all, and illustrations showing how relevance always hinges.