Character
Evidence of a person's general disposition, generally inadmissible to prove conduct in conformity on a specific occasion.
The classic MBE stem buries character inside a relevance problem: it offers a prior bad act and asks whether it comes in. The tell is the offering party’s purpose — if the only logical chain runs “bad act, therefore bad person, therefore did it again,” the propensity bar (Rule 404) kills it; if the act proves a MIMIC purpose (motive, intent, identity, etc.), it survives under Rule 404(b)(2), subject only to Rule 403 balancing. Watch the 2020 amendment: in criminal cases the prosecutor must give written pretrial notice of 404(b) evidence and articulate its non-propensity purpose.
The trap is conflating doctrines that share the word “character.” Impeachment uses character for truthfulness to attack a testifying witness’s credibility, not to prove the underlying conduct — a different gateway (Rules 607–609) with different limits. And habit (Rule 406) is admissible precisely where character is not, because habit is a regular, near-automatic response to a repeated specific situation (“habit, not horoscope”), proving conduct in conformity directly.
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