Abstract
FROM time to time it has been pointed out in these columns that the services rendered to litigators as such by so-called scientific experts is antagonistic to the pure spirit that should actuate men of science. For some years the position and character of the representative of science in courts of justice has been acquiring interest, not only in England but elsewhere. In fact, a few years ago a Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was appointed to consider the whole matter, but no report of their proceedings has yet been published. An excellent discussion of the subject, however, comes from America in the form of a reprinted lecture on “The Scientific Expert in Foreign Procedure,” by Prof. C. F. Himes, which appears in the June number of the Journal of the Franklin Institute. In order to direct the discussion, Prof. Himes first gives legal opinions as to the status of the expert. “Justice Miller,” he says, “exhibited a plan of objection in a charge as follows:— ‘My own experience, both in local courts and in the Supreme Court of the United States is, that when the matter in contest involves an immense sum in value, there is no difficulty in introducing any amount of expert testimony on either side.’ Another judge, in a lecture upon medical expertism, gives a similar opinion, that the ground of dissatisfaction in regard to medical testimony to both the professions of law and medicine, are reducible to one—that upon every conceivable issue expert opinions are procurable which sustain, or seem to sustain, the most contradictory views.” But Prof. Himes does not take a pessimistic view of the scientific expert. He is inclined to believe that:— “The scientific expert is simply a product, and an extreme product, of an advanced and lapidly advancing civilisation. He was recognised in the germ, to be sure, by the old Roman law, and we may assume in all systems of jurisprudence; But he has acquired an immensely increased importance, and a much wider field and a far greater frequency of employment by the recent, and very recent, marvellous advances in the applications of science—applications which have increased the sphere of things to be litigated about, which have introduced facts of an entirely new character to be adjudicated upon, to say nothing of the contribution that science has made, and is continually making, in many ordinary cases, of conclusive missing links of evidence which render decision previously uncertain, comfortably certain, and satisfactory.
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The Position of Scientific Experts. Nature 48, 381–383 (1893). https://doi.org/10.1038/048381a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/048381a0