Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Table of legislation
- Table of cases
- Introduction
- 1 General epistemological issues
- 2 Expert evidence as a special case for judicial assessment
- 3 Making sense of expert disagreement
- 4 Non-epistemological factors in determining the role of the expert
- 5 Assessing expert evidence in the English civil courts: the sixteenth to twentieth centuries
- 6 Assessing expert evidence in the English civil courts today
- 7 The effective management of bias
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998
- Appendix 2 Tables of pre-1800 civil cases involving expert evidence
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2009
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Preface
- Table of legislation
- Table of cases
- Introduction
- 1 General epistemological issues
- 2 Expert evidence as a special case for judicial assessment
- 3 Making sense of expert disagreement
- 4 Non-epistemological factors in determining the role of the expert
- 5 Assessing expert evidence in the English civil courts: the sixteenth to twentieth centuries
- 6 Assessing expert evidence in the English civil courts today
- 7 The effective management of bias
- Conclusion
- Appendix 1 Part 35 of the Civil Procedure Rules 1998
- Appendix 2 Tables of pre-1800 civil cases involving expert evidence
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Let there be no mistake. As science continues to change the social world, great transformations of social enquiry lie ahead for all justice systems. These transformations could turn out to be as momentous as those that occurred in the twilight of the Middle Ages, when magical forms of proof retreated before the prototypes of our present evidentiary technology.
In this book I have sought to address two fundamental questions about the judicial assessment of expert evidence. First, how can a non-specialist court accurately determine facts that require specialist knowledge? This includes the subsidiary question of how, if a specialist advises the court, the non-specialist court can know whether to accept the advice? Secondly, how should we arrange our legal processes to best support our expectations of accurate fact determination, and other procedural goals, arising in whole or in part from expert evidence? Broadly, the first question has been addressed in Chapters 1 to 3, and the second question in Chapters 4 to 7. But the first question cannot be properly answered without an answer to the second, and vice versa. There are two integrating themes that have helped to define the approach taken in this book. The first has been an attempt to begin to re-integrate legal evidence theory with classical epistemology. The second has been an attempt to begin to re-integrate the study of evidence with that of procedure.
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- The Judicial Assessment of Expert Evidence , pp. 366 - 373Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
, ‘Some Scepticism About Some Scepticisms’, in Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 99–164, pp. 120–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and , ‘Equivocal Rulings on Expert Psychological and Psychiatric Evidence: Turning a Muddle into a Nonsense’ [1996] Criminal Law Review88–95Google Scholar
and , ‘Juries and Expert Evidence: Social Framework Testimony’ (1989) 52 Law and Contemporary Problems133–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Are the Courts Excessively Deferential to the Medical Profession?’ (2001) 9 Medical Law Review1–16Google ScholarPubMed
: ‘[W]e understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation’: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 170Google Scholar
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