This article attempts to examine the existing medico legal structure and practice in Sri Lanka with a view to identify a) the space and opportunity available for a forensic expert to appear as an expert witness for the defense in a criminal court b) the challenges and obstacles such experts would have to face in appearing for the defense. This submission, in essence, illustrates the relevance o...

Participants in two experiments acted as jurors for a personal-injury case containing different types of expert testimony. In both experiments, the defendant was more likely to obtain a verdict in his favor when his expert presented anecdotal case histories than when the expert presented experimental data. Participants’ liability judgments were correlated with their perceptions of the experts’ ...

[In the civil justice system, medical expert witnesses act as brokers of what qualifies as legally recognised and compensable injury. Despite the central importance of their role, and continuing debate over the use of expert evidence, remarkably little empirical evidence is available about who medical experts are and what they do. This article reports findings from a study that built a detailed...

The Supreme Court, in Daubert v. Merrell Dow explored the guidelines for admitting "scientific evidence" by way of expert opinion in legal cases. The Federal Rules of Evidence that were revised in 1975 did not explicitly mention the Frye standard and thus left it unclear as to what guidelines should be used by judges in federal courts. The Court held that the Frye rule was superseded by the new...

Like all physicians, radiologists in the United States are subject to frequent and costly medical malpractice claims. Legal scholars and physicians concur that the US civil justice system is neither precise nor accurate in determining whether malpractice has truly occurred in cases in which claims are made. Sometimes, this inaccuracy is driven by biases inherent in medical expert-witness opinio...

Using court records involving the expert testimony of the Berlin sexologist Albert Moll, my article demonstrates that during the early 1920s a shift in the 'epistemologies of justice' concerning the adjudication of sex crimes took place within German courtrooms. Namely, presiding judges considered a greater number of sexual acts as punishable, despite no change in the laws themselves. Central t...