Are Expert Witnesses Whores? Reflections on Objectivity in Scholarship and Expert Witnessing

Bibliographic Data

ID11664396
AuthorsJ Morgan Kousser (0000-0001-5261-2859, California Institute of Technology, corresponding author)
Year1984
Volume6
Issue1
Pages5-19
Publication date1984-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Public Historian (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0272-3433 • E-ISSN: 1533-8576
PublisherUniversity of California Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2307/3377681
OpenAlexW2144072056
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited3

Some have derided the claim that historians or others who serve as expert witnesses or otherwise engage in advocacy live up to the usual standards of scholarly objectivity. A comparison of the modes of scholarly and advocacy production, based on my experience as an expert witness in six minority voting rights cases, however, suggests that the two modes are not very different, and that there are no compelling reasons to expect different outputs from them. The scholarly process is less pure and the adversary system provides more safeguards in this example than many suppose. Selling one's soul is both inefficient and dangerous. The comparison, however, has adverse implications for Lee Benson's recent proposal for the establishment of a formally associated group of social scientists, which would be unlikely, in my view, either to "change social science" in a desirable direction or to "change the world

Epistemology · Objectivity (philosophy · Political science · Scholarship · Sociology · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Legal Education and Practice Innovations · Medical Malpractice and Liability Issues · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access