Objection (United States law)

In U.S. law, an objection is a formal challenge raised when a question, piece of evidence, or argument violates the rules of evidence or other procedural rules. These objections typically occur during trial, often to block a witness’s testimony, but they can also be made during depositions or in response to written discovery requests. Once an objection is raised at trial, the judge decides whether to “sustain” it—agreeing and excluding the question, testimony, or evidence—or “overrule” it, allowing the matter to proceed. If the judge permits, the attorney may rephrase a questioned question. Lawyers must object before the witness answers, and research shows that frequent objections do not turn jurors against the attorney.

Beyond trial, an attorney may object to a judge’s ruling to preserve the right to appeal that decision. In some pretrial hearings, courts must resolve issues like personal jurisdiction or sanctions for misconduct; at these hearings, parties object to evidence to ask the court to disregard improper material and to preserve the objection for later appeal. During depositions, objections are used to keep testimony from being used later in motions, such as a motion for summary judgment.

Historically, after an objection was overruled at trial, an attorney had to immediately say “I except” and give a reason, or the objection was lost. Then, at trial’s end, the lawyer had to submit a written “bill of exceptions” listing all exceptions for appeal, which the judge signed and sealed. This bill came from early English practice, where pleadings were oral and clerks recorded only summaries. Trial courts sometimes avoided appellate review by having clerks omit certain rulings. Parliament addressed this in 1285 with the Statute of Westminster, which forced judges to seal a party’s written bill of exceptions, making it part of the appellate record.

Once American courts began using court reporters to produce accurate, verbatim transcripts, lawyers and judges realized exceptions were unnecessary—the objection and surrounding record were enough for appeals. Starting in the 1930s, exceptions were abolished in federal courts and many state courts. California, for example, made exceptions superfluous by treating nearly every trial court ruling as automatically excepted to. Today, in almost all U.S. courts, it is enough that the objection was clearly stated on the record.

A continuing objection allows an attorney to object to a series of related questions without interrupting the trial for each one. The court may permit this to preserve an issue for appeal while avoiding distractions for the jury or judge. A continuing objection is typically granted when the initial objection is overruled, and the judge allows silent objections to similar questions. For instance, a lawyer might be found negligent for failing to object to a line of questioning, even after earlier objections were overruled.

Proper grounds for objecting to a question include: ambiguous, confusing, misleading, vague, or unintelligible (the question is unclear); arguing the law (counsel is instructing the jury on legal rules); argumentative (the question argues rather than asks); asked and answered (the same attorney repeats a question already answered); unrelated to a peremptory challenge or challenge for cause (during jury selection); asks the jury to prejudge the evidence (jurors cannot promise a verdict based on assumed facts); and assumes facts not in evidence (the question presumes something not yet proven). In practice, courts tolerate some broad initial questions to avoid bootstrapping issues, expecting counsel to narrow the focus as examination proceeds.