Judging Expert Testimony: From Verbal Formalism to Practical Advice

Abstract

Appraising the worth of others’ testimony is always complex; appraising the worth of expert testimony is even harder; appraising the worth of expert testimony in a legal context is harder yet. Legal efforts to assess the reliability of expert testimony—I’ll focus on evolving U.S. law governing the admissibility of such testimony—seem far from adequate, offering little effective practical guidance. My purpose in this paper is to think through what might be done to offer courts more real, operational help. The first step is to explain why the legal formulae that have evolved over the years may seem reassuring, but aren’t really of much practical use. The next is to suggest that we might do better not by amending evidentiary rules but by helping judges and attorneys understand what questions they should ask about expert evidence. I focus here on (i) epidemiological testimony, and (ii) the process of peer review.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,593

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Similar books and articles

Ethics Expert Testimony: Against the Skeptics.G. J. Agich & B. J. Spielman - 1997 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 22 (4):381-403.
English Law's Epistemology of Expert Testimony.Tony Ward - 2006 - Journal of Law and Society 33 (4):572-595.
Moral Advice and Joint Agency.Eric Wiland - 2018 - In Mark C. Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Volume 8. Oxford University Press. pp. 102-123.
Rebuttal: Expert Ethics Testimony.Françoise Baylis - 2000 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 28 (3):240-242.
Rebuttal: Expert Ethics Testimony.Françoise Baylis - 2000 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 28 (3):240-242.
Aiding self-knowledge.Casey Doyle - 2019 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 49 (8):1104-1121.
A Critical Introduction to Testimony.Axel Gelfert - 2014 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Expert Opinion and Second‐Hand Knowledge.Matthew A. Benton - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2):492-508.

Analytics

Added to PP
2022-11-28

Downloads
10 (#1,025,836)

6 months
4 (#319,344)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Susan Haack
University of Miami

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references