Experts in The Real World
Typically, experts are relied on for opinions on severity of injury, degree of insanity, cause of failure in a machine or other device, loss of earnings, care costs, and the like. In an intellectual property case, an expert may be shown two music scores, book texts, or circuit boards and asked to ascertain their degree of similarity. In the majority of cases the expert's personal relation to the defendant is considered irrelevant.
The tribunal itself, or the judge, can in some systems call upon experts to technically evaluate a certain fact or action, in order to provide the court with a complete knowledge on the fact/action it is judging. The expertise has the legal value of an acquisition of data. The results of these experts are then compared to those by the experts of the parties.
The expert has a heavy responsibility, especially in penal trials, and perjury by an expert is a severely punished crime in most countries. The use of expert witnesses is sometimes criticized in the United States because in civil trials, they are often used by both sides to advocate differing positions, and it is left up to a jury to decide which expert witness to believe. Although experts are legally prohibited from expressing their opinion of submitted evidence until after they are hired, sometimes a party can surmise beforehand, because of reputation or prior cases, that the testimony will be favorable regardless of any basis in the submitted data; such experts are commonly disparaged as "hired guns."
Read more about this topic: Expert Witness
Famous quotes containing the words experts, real and/or world:
“Personally I think we’re over-specialized. Why it’s getting so we have experts who concentrate only on the lower section of a specimen’s left ear.”
—Martin Berkeley, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Clete Ferguson (John Agar)
“A real man doesn’t have to run from his mother, and may even have to face the reality that no great deed is going to be great enough for him to ransom himself completely, and he may always be in his mother’s debt. If he understands that . . . he won’t have to feel guilty, and he won’t have to please her completely. He can go ahead and be nice to her and let her be part of his life.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)