Are Expert Witnesses Whores? Reflections on Objectivity in Scholarship and Expert Witnessing

Abstract

Some have derided the claim that historians or others who serve as expert witnesses or otherwise engage in advocacy live up to the usual standards of scholarly objectivity. A comparison of the modes of scholarly and advocacy production, based on my experience as an expert witness in six minority voting rights cases, however, suggests that the two modes are not very different, and that there are no compelling reasons to expect different outputs from them. The scholarly process is less pure and the adversary system provides more safeguards in this example than many suppose. Selling one's soul is both inefficient and dangerous. The comparison, however, has adverse implications for Lee Benson's recent proposal for the establishment of a formally associated group of social scientists, which would be unlikely, in my view, either to "change social science" in a desirable direction or to "change the world."