Law Commons^™

Questions About Forensic Science: Response, Jonathan Koehler

Faculty Working Papers

THE ESSENTIAL MESSAGE OF OUR REVIEW WAS that forensic individualization/identification science is on course for a "paradigm shift" in which its future will be more scientifically grounded than its past.

Harmon and Budowle take issue with the simple point that traditional forensic science assumes that markings produced by different people and objects are observably different. The notion of uniqueness is widespread in forensic science writing, thinking, and practice. We added the qualifier "discernible" to the uniqueness assumption to indicate that criminalists do not refer to uniqueness in the abstract or as a metaphysical property. They mean that conclusions about object …