The Legal, Political, and Social Filtering of Expert Witnesses into Court

专家证人经常出现在法庭上，他们对法官和陪审员的影响已被广泛研究。然而，在专家作证之前，他们首先必须由审判法官允许进入法庭。鉴于专家有可能影响法庭案件和司法先例，法官关于接纳哪些专家、排除哪些专家的决定至关重要。这些决定的法律框架侧重于专家证据的科学质量，例如其可靠性。然而，专业专家证据的科学质量是非专家难以判断的。本研究探讨了影响法庭上专家证据可采性的社会和政治因素。具体来说，它考察了诸如专家的性别、年龄和学科等社会线索如何与他们对证据的可信度和可采性的看法相关。这些发现可以通过揭示可能干扰专家可采性的社会偏见，为法院使用专家证据提供信息。因此，这项研究有可能通过确定专家证据进入法庭所涉及的社会和政治因素来改善法律决策。私家侦探和一组研究生助理将对联邦地区法院关于专家可采性的书面司法意见的大概率样本进行内容编码。来自司法意见的数据将与司法意见中未包含的关于法官和专家的社会人口信息相结合。对结果数据集的统计分析将提供对联邦法院可采性挑战和决定的总体比率和分布的全面调查。这些数据还将促进我们对法官和专家的社会特征与专家证据的可采性之间的关系的理解。现有的专家证据采信理论将专家证据的科学价值放在首位。这个项目拓宽了分析的视角，以捕捉过滤专家看法的社会和政治力量，并使一些专家看起来比其他专家更可信。了解法官和专家证人与专家可采性相关的属性，将有助于未来的诉讼当事人更有效地部署和反驳专家证据。更好地了解这些程序还将有助于法官在确定专家证据的可采性时对其进行评价，从而提高法庭允许的专家证据的质量。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Expert witnesses appear frequently in courts and their impact on judges and jurors has been studied extensively. However, before experts testify they first must be admitted into court by trial judges. Given experts’ potential to influence court cases and judicial precedent, judges’ decisions about which experts to admit and which to exclude are vitally important. The legal framework for these decisions focuses on the scientific qualities of expert evidence, such as its reliability. However, the scientific qualities of specialized expert evidence are difficult for non-experts to judge. This study investigates the social and political factors related to the admissibility of expert evidence in court. Specifically, it examines how social cues such as experts’ sex, age, and discipline relate to perceptions of their credibility and the admissibility of their evidence. The findings can inform courts’ use of expert evidence by revealing social biases that may interfere with expert admissibility. This research therefore has the potential to improve legal decision making by identifying the social and political factors involved with the entry of expert evidence into court.The PI and a team of graduate assistants will content-code a large probability sample of written judicial opinions on expert admissibility from federal district courts. Data from judicial opinions will be combined with socio-demographic information about judges and experts not contained in judicial opinions. Statistical analyses of the resulting dataset will provide a comprehensive survey of overall rates and distributions of admissibility challenges and decisions in federal courts. These data will also advance our understanding of how social characteristics of judges and experts relate to the admissibility of expert evidence. Existing theories of expert admissibility prioritize the scientific merit of expert evidence. This project widens the analytic lens to capture the social and political forces that filter perceptions of experts and make some experts seem more credible than others. Understanding the attributes of judges and expert witnesses associated with expert admissibility will help future litigants deploy—and contest—expert evidence more effectively. Better knowledge of these processes will also assist judges in their evaluations of expert evidence when they determine its admissibility, thereby improving the quality of expert evidence allowed into courts.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.