IAFL Guidelines
Definition
The professional standards issued by the International Association of Forensic Linguists for practitioners acting as expert witnesses, covering independence, disclosure, competence, and transparency.
- Issued by
- International Association of Forensic Linguists
- Core areas
- Independence, disclosure, competence, transparency
- Applies to
- Expert witness practice in forensic linguistics
- Field
- Forensic linguistics ethics
Common questions
Why does 'independence' appear as a core area of the IAFL guidelines?+
An expert who is perceived as advocating for the party that retained them, rather than reporting an objective linguistic analysis, undermines the value of the evidence, so the guidelines emphasize maintaining analytical distance from the instructing party's interests.
What does 'disclosure' require under the IAFL guidelines in practice?+
Experts are expected to disclose the methods, materials, and limitations of their analysis, including any data or alternative explanations that do not support their conclusion, so the court can assess the full basis for the opinion rather than a selective summary.
Related terms
- Confirmation Bias
- The cognitive tendency to search for, interpret, favour, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or...
- Daubert Standard
- The US federal evidentiary standard (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) requiring that expert testimony be based on scientifically valid methods with...
- Duty to the Court
- The obligation of expert witnesses in UK proceedings (and, to varying degrees, in other jurisdictions) to assist the court with objective, unbiased...
- Frye Standard
- The US legal test for admissibility of scientific evidence, originating from Frye v. United States (1923), which required that a technique be...
- Validation
- The process of establishing through systematic testing that a method does what it claims to do, within defined conditions and with a...