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得到广泛研究。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，法官决定哪些专家可以被接纳，哪些专家可以被排除是至关重要的。这些决定的法律的框架侧重于专家证据的科学质量，例如其可靠性。然而，专业化的专家证据的科学性，非专家难以判断。本研究探讨了与专家证据在法庭上的可采性相关的社会和政治因素。具体来说，它研究了社会线索，如专家的性别，年龄和学科与他们的可信度和证据的可接受性的看法。调查结果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，这项研究有可能提高法律的决策，通过确定与专家证据进入courtes.The PI和一个研究生助理团队的社会和政治因素将内容编码的大概率样本的书面司法意见专家受理联邦地区法院。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。由此产生的数据集的统计分析将提供一个全面的调查的整体率和分布的可受理性的挑战和决定，在联邦法院。这些数据也将促进我们对法官和专家的社会特征如何与专家证据的可采性相关的理解。现有的专家可采性理论优先考虑专家证据的科学价值。这个项目拓宽了分析的透镜，以捕捉过滤专家的看法，使一些专家似乎比其他人更可信的社会和政治力量。了解法官和专家证人的属性与专家的可采性将有助于未来的诉讼当事人部署和更有效地专家证据。更好地了解这些过程也将有助于法官在他们的评估专家证据时，他们决定其可采性，从而提高质量的专家证据允许进入courtes.This奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

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.