The Role of the Expert Witness

In this chapter, we discuss general aspects of the role of the expert in court and issues faced by experts. The chapter is written largely from a Dutch perspective, so that references to the Court almost exclusively refer to a judge rather than a jury acting as a fact-finder. Notwithstanding this perspective of the authors, the concepts illustrated herein are widely applicable to issues relating to experts serving in courts outside of the Netherlands.
Although the discussions in this chapter are intended to apply to experts in forensic epidemiology, we draw extensively from writings in Law and Economics, in part because so much has been published in this area on the topic of experts and expert testimony, and in part because these writings translate well to other disciplines.