In the landmark case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the Supreme Court of the United States articulated the admissibility standard for expert evidence. In jurisdictions that have adopted the Daubert standard, trial court judges must make difficult decisions regarding the admissibility of proffered expert evidence. Although all federal courts and nearly all state courts use the Daubert standard, we know little about how judges fulfill their gatekeeping role when making admissibility decisions. This chapter reviews the empirical and theoretical considerations regarding how judges in Daubert jurisdictions determine which proffered expert evidence should be admitted. After reviewing the standards governing the admissibility of expert testimony, which includes a discussion of the Federal Rules of Evidence, Daubert, and related cases, the chapter provides a discussion of each Daubert criterion, including the available evidence relating to judges’ understanding of those criteria. It then discusses the heuristics and biases that affect judicial decision-making. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for practice and research.

The chapter scrutinizes the recourse to legal witnesses on points of international law through the lens of the specific texture of customary international law. Part I will present and comparatively assess the abundance of the recourse in investment arbitration to expert witnesses on issues of international law; part II will then proceed to a theoretical analysis which will set, according to a formalist approach of that source of law, and test the hypothesis that international law witnesses in investment arbitration could well be justified when they deal with customary international law. It will conclude that, at most, customary norms may have been the Trojan horse of the recourse to international law experts in investment arbitration since international law witnesses are seldom relied on for the purposes of ascertaining the contents of customary international law. Once the relationship between customary law and expert witnesses will be discarded, Part III will examine an alternative justification which has more to do with the sociology of investment law and with its constant search for legitimacy, than with any formal analysis of the sources of international law.

Beyond any theoretical suppositions or assumptions regarding the greater reliability of court-appointed experts as opposed to expert witnesses, very few analyses have been conducted to test the hypothesis in current legal systems. And this is precisely the objective of this work: taking the current Spanish procedural system as my example, I will set out to question not only the necessary epistemic superiority of court-appointed expert opinions, but also the fact that the mere origin of the expert opinion is a relevant factor that should be considered. As we shall see, the selection, prepping and remuneration of the expert could be regulated in such a way that they do not even guarantee the impartiality of the court-appointed expert; however, in order to assess the reliability of an expert opinion we would have to evaluate what the expert did and asserted in the specific case, and this is independent of their origin.

This chapter concerns the role of witnesses in litigation pre-trial and will focus on the preparation of affidavits and witness statements for use in trials but will also consider affidavits used in interlocutory disputes.1 Obtaining evidence from witnesses, both lay and expert, is one of the key procedures available in litigation which is absent from other forms of civil dispute resolution. Witness evidence is also one of the most time-consuming and expensive aspects of case preparation, particularly expert evidence as experts can be extremely costly.2 Expert witnessing has been the subject of considerable contention, reform and debate, both within the legal fraternity and in the broader community. The preparation of expert evidence demonstrates many of the key conflicts explored in Chapter 2.3, particularly the balancing of efficiency with due consideration. The preparation of witness evidence also engages with the key civil dispute resolution issues of access to justice and open justice. The time and expense associated with locating witnesses and preparing affidavits highlights the potential for the wealthy to be unfairly advantaged when preparing for litigation.

Chapters 4 and 5 explore how various subject positions (or what Foucault describes as enunciative modalities) influenced how knowledge was produced within the archive, from which perspective records were constructed and, ultimately, what was to be archived. In Chapter 4, ‘Contesting the Archive’, I focus on the witnesses, who played a far more significant role in constructing the archive than scholars normally credit. Whilst this shows how legal actors constrained what witnesses could record within the archive, it also demonstrates how witnesses were able to contest these parameters both in terms of which crimes would be recorded, but also how the law was to account for violence. This contestation also destabilised many of the objects and subjects that the legal discourse tried to produce, such as what constituted a victim or perpetrator.

Using illustrations from proceedings over Pradaxa, Yasmin/Yaz, Zimmer’s Durom Hip Cups, and the World Trade Center disaster, this chapter narrates some of the judicial nudges lurking behind the following statistics: a mere 8 percent of judges in the dataset took no steps whatsoever to endorse, promote, or enforce private deals. Instead, 64.7 percent of judges presiding over private aggregate settlements formally appointed the private claims administrator or settlement master. And, to varying degrees, 52.9 percent of federal judges “approved” private settlements, blurring conventional wisdom that private settlements are just that – private. Settlement designers hope that a judicial imprimatur will persuade nonlead lawyers and plaintiffs alike to settle, so they ask judges to intervene in some explicit or implicit way. But judges often lack the information they need to send reliable signals and conduct no formal inquiries to determine whether settlements are fair. Plus, when judges use their power to approve, enforce, and push plaintiffs into private settlements, they not only appear to exceed the authority that rightly belongs to them, they may also impinge on plaintiffs’ free will to consent.