Duty of impartiality
Definition
The expert's overriding obligation to the court, not to the retaining party. An expert must present findings fairly, including findings that favour the opposing party, and must not advocate beyond what the evidence supports.
Related terms
- Daubert standard
- The US federal evidentiary standard (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) requiring that expert testimony be based on scientifically valid methods with...
- Factual section vs interpretation section
- A structural distinction in expert reports between what was observed (verifiable facts, not requiring expert judgment) and what those observations mean (expert...
- Frye standard
- The US legal test for admissibility of scientific evidence, originating from Frye v. United States (1923), which required that a technique be...
- Likelihood ratio (LR)
- The ratio of two conditional probabilities: the probability of the observed evidence given the prosecution's hypothesis (same source), divided by the probability...
- Verbal scale
- The ENFSI translation of numerical likelihood ratios into courtroom language: very strong support (LR over 10,000), strong support (LR 1,000-10,000), moderate support...
Explained in
- Expert Reporting and Court Testimony in Forensic BotanyThe expert's overriding obligation to the court, not to the retaining party. An expert must present findings fairly, including findings that favour the opposin...