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Argument From Expert Opinion As Legal Evidence: Critical Questions And Admissibility Criteria Of Expert Testimony In The American Legal System, David M. Godden, Douglas Walton
Argument From Expert Opinion As Legal Evidence: Critical Questions And Admissibility Criteria Of Expert Testimony In The American Legal System, David M. Godden, Douglas Walton
CRRAR Publications
While courts depend on expert opinions in reaching sound judgments, the role of the expert witness in legal proceedings is associated with a litany of problems. Perhaps most prevalent is the question of under what circumstances should testimony be admitted as expert opinion. We review the changing policies adopted by American courts in an attempt to ensure the reliability and usefulness of the scientific and technical information admitted as evidence. We argue that these admissibility criteria are best seen in a dialectical context as a set of critical questions of the kind commonly used in models of argumentation.
Examination Dialogue: An Argumentation Framework For Critically Questioning An Expert Opinion, Douglas Walton
Examination Dialogue: An Argumentation Framework For Critically Questioning An Expert Opinion, Douglas Walton
CRRAR Publications
Recent work in argumentation theory (Walton and Krabbe, 1995; Walton, 2005) and artificial intelligence (Bench-Capon, 1992, 2003; Cawsey, 1992; McBurney and Parsons, 2002; Bench-Capon and Prakken, 2005) uses types of dialogue as contexts of argument use. This paper provides an analysis of a special type called examination dialogue, in which one party questions another party, sometimes critically or even antagonistically, to try to find out what that party knows about something. This type of dialogue is most prominent in law and in both legal and non-legal arguments based on expert opinion. It is also central to dialogue systems for questioning …