Sure. It's hard to give advise, because anything you say depends on assuming some particular degree of experience and legal sense on the part of the witness. And "Objection" always brings things to an instant halt. "That's enough!" doesn't necessarily stop me, but it's only happened once or twice with inept attorneys who really wished they hadn't asked the question.L.J.Steele wrote:I'd be cautious about continuing after being cut off -- there's some case law in a couple of states allowing the defendant on appeal to claim error caused by deliberate witness misconduct when an experienced witness appears to deliberately be interjecting matters in violation of a court order, well-known evidentiary rule, etc.
As to organizational rules about the nature of conclusions, to what degree do any other organizations try to define or limit how their people state their conclusions? I was tempted to limit the question to private certifying organizations, but I think it's a valid question about any professional organization, since mere membership can be an expected and respected "qualification," without regard to certification. (At any rate, getting kicked out looks very bad.) I know of professional organizations ousting members for testifying beyond what they deem the limits of science, but those I know of depended on very general sorts of rules that didn't state any particular conclusions to be outside the pale but required the committee or whatever to make a judgment call at the time of the complaint.
When the rules are stated in general terms, it pretty much becomes a matter of what is so offensive or embarrassing to enough of the membership that a committee is prepared to say it's beyond any reasonable definition of the capabilities of the discipline. So the offending act has to be pretty well agreed to be outrageous, because it's likely to draw a lawsuit from the expelled member on the grounds that there's no real definition and it's just the action of a vengeful mob.
Specific rules avoid that subjective judgment of violation. But they risk encroaching on the professional judgment of one or another member and risk degenerating into semantic arguments over differences between statements of opinion of truths and statements of truths. So they're very rarely, if ever, enforced, and so therefore, again, are saved for instances of conduct very much farther outside the pale than the mere rules reflect. Specific rules become more cautionary statements to the effect that, "The consensus is that you shouldn't do something, so please don't embarrass yourself and the rest of us by doing it. We're pretty serious about this, because, look, we say you can get kicked out for doing it."