A party admission, in the law of evidence, is any statement made by a declarant who is a party to a lawsuit, which is offered as evidence against that party. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, such a statement is admissible to prove the truth of the statement itself, meaning that it constitutes an exception to the prohibition on hearsay - indeed, this is probably the most important category of exceptions to the inadmissibility of out-of-court statements. When the term "exception" is used, though, it does not mean that the statement is hearsay but comes in under a hearsay exception. Rather, a party admission is classified as "nonhearsay" by the Fed. R. Evid. 801(d)(1)(A).

The statement is admissible even if the declarant had no basis for knowing the truth of the statement. For example, if an employee rushes to tell the director of a trucking company that one of his trucks has been in an accident, and the director says, "oh, we're behaving so negligently, lately," that statement will be admissible - even though the manager had no reason to know that this particular accident was the result of negligence.

The basis for this exception is that people are unlikely to make misrepresentations against their own interests.

Hearsay