This article identifies an overlooked legacy of the child protection movement in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century U.S.: transformations in evidence law and procedure that undermined common-law restrictions on children's testimony. Scholarship on the nineteenth-century modernization of evidence law argues that the rise of cross-examination allowed for the demise of common-law witness disqualification rules. The erosion of restrictions on children's testimony, however, requires an alternative or additional explanation, because cross-examination did not allay fears about children's reliability. The driving force for changes in the law governing child witnesses, I argue, was the slate of nineteenth-century child protection laws whose enforcement typically required children's testimony. The case study of Progressive-Era New York, presented here, reveals how evidence law and procedure adapted to substantive law's demand for children's evidence: reformers legislated an exception to the common-law oath requirement in children's cases, pushed trial courts to modernize their approach to examining child witnesses’ competency, and expanded the state's power to detain children as material witnesses. Those reforms fostered the ends of law enforcement, but did not resolve enduring debates about the reliability risks of children's testimony and the costs of testifying for children's wellbeing.

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国家证人：儿童与现代证据法的制定

本文指出了十九世纪末二十世纪初美国儿童保护运动的一个被忽视的遗产：证据法和程序的转变破坏了普通法对儿童证词的限制。关于十九世纪证据法现代化的学术研究认为，盘问的兴起导致了普通法证人取消资格规则的消亡。然而，对儿童证词限制的削弱需要替代或额外的解释，因为交叉询问并不能减轻对儿童可靠性的担忧。我认为，儿童证人法律变革的推动力是一系列十九世纪的儿童保护法，这些法律的执行通常需要儿童的证词。这里介绍的进步时代纽约的案例研究揭示了证据法和程序如何适应实体法对儿童证据的要求：改革者立法规定了儿童案件中普通法宣誓要求的例外，推动初审法院使其方法现代化审查儿童证人的能力，并扩大国家拘留儿童作为重要证人的权力。这些改革促进了执法的目的，但没有解决有关儿童证词的可靠性风险以及为儿童福祉作证的成本的持久争论。