Law Commons^™

Confrontation And The Law Of Evidence: Can The Language Conduit Theory Survive In The Wake Of Crawford?, Tom S. Xu

Vanderbilt Law Review

A foreign traveler flies into John F. Kennedy International Airport, supposedly on a business trip. At the airport, a customs inspector detains him after discovering what appear to be bags of cocaine concealed in his luggage. The traveler speaks limited English, so the inspector requests the aid of a certified government interpreter to question him. An English-speaking Drug Enforcement Administration ("DEA") agent thereafter interrogates the traveler by having the interpreter translate his questions to Spanish, the traveler's native tongue. The interpreter then translates the traveler's responses from Spanish to English, and the inspector records the translated responses. At trial, the …

Neuroscientists In Court, Owen D. Jones, Anthony D. Wagner, David L. Faigman, Marcus E. Raichle

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly being offered in court cases. Consequently, the legal system needs neuroscientists to act as expert witnesses who can explain the limitations and interpretations of neuroscientific findings so that judges and jurors can make informed and appropriate inferences. The growing role of neuroscientists in court means that neuroscientists should be aware of important differences between the scientific and legal fields, and, especially, how scientific facts can be easily misunderstood by non-scientists,including judges and jurors.

This article describes similarities, as well as key differences, of legal and scientific cultures. And it explains six key principles about neuroscience that …

Group To Individual Inference In Scientific Expert Testimony, Christopher Slobogin, David Faigman, John Monahan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

A fundamental divide exists between what scientists do as scientists and what courts often ask them to do as expert witnesses. Whereas scientists almost invariably inquire into phenomena at the group level, trial courts typically need to resolve cases at the individual level. In short, scientists generalize while courts particularize. A basic challenge for trial courts that rely on scientific experts, therefore, concerns determining whether and how scientific knowledge derived from studying groups can be helpful in the individual cases before them (what this Article refers to as "G2i'). To aid in dealing with this challenge, this Article proposes a …