602
Opinion of the Court
words spoken under different circumstances, e. g., to an acquaintance, would have no difficulty in qualifying. . . .
"The balancing of self-serving against dissenting [sic] aspects of a declaration is discussed in McCormick § 256." 28 U. S. C. App., p. 790.
This language, however, is not particularly clear, and some of it—especially the Advisory Committee's endorsement of the position taken by Dean McCormick's treatise—points the other way:
"A certain latitude as to contextual statements, neutral as to interest, giving meaning to the declaration against interest seems defensible, but bringing in self-serving statements contextually seems questionable.
. . . . . ". . . [A]dmit[ting] the disserving parts of the declaration, and exclud[ing] the self-serving parts . . . seems the most realistic method of adjusting admissibility to trustworthiness, where the serving and disserving parts can be severed." See C. McCormick, Law of Evidence § 256, pp. 552-553 (1954) (footnotes omitted).
Without deciding exactly how much weight to give the Notes in this particular situation, compare Schiavone v. Fortune, 477 U. S. 21, 31 (1986) (Notes are to be given some weight), with Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co., 490 U. S. 504, 528 (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment) (Notes ought to be given no weight), we conclude that the policy expressed in the Rule's text points clearly enough in one direction that it outweighs whatever force the Notes may have. And though Justice Kennedy believes that the text can fairly be read as expressing a policy of admitting collateral statements, post, at 614, for the reasons given above we disagree.
B
We also do not share Justice Kennedy's fears that our reading of the Rule "eviscerate[s] the against penal interest
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