Evidence, expertise and the emergency physician: doctors should anticipate legal reform in their expert evidence.

Abstract

The court system is particularly dependent on expertise in science and medicine. Medical experts should be aware that their legal evidence has the potential to work against justice as there are partisan selection, financial, and adversarial pressures; and laws of evidence which allow legal evidence to be admissible without definition of its medical-evidence base. Currently the main checks on an expert's legal evidence are the professional integrity of the expert, and cross-examination. However, there is good reason to expect reform of the laws of legal evidence to define objective criteria for the admissibility of scientific legal evidence. In anticipation of these reforms, emergency physicians appearing in court should address the medical-evidence base of their legal evidence.