CLPEX Chat Board

I attended a leadership presentation this week and the speaker was excellent. So much so that I bought one of his books. There is an interesting observation on one of the first pages of the book that I thought was appropriate for Forensic practitioners.

With full credit to Mr Robert Stevenson (http://www.RobertStevenson.org) I share his thought

"Don't question the agenda of the critic; just learn from it, because the end result is a better you....not a better them"

Hello Bill, to follow up on your citation, criticism in nothing new. We should always seek to better understand and explain what we do. Tal Golan writes, “Discontent with scientific expertise in the courts has existed as long as there have been scientific expert witnesses, and by the mid-nineteenth century, the debate over the meaning of these conflicts and the ways to resolve them had all the features that today are blithely assumed to be new…But it will, at least, reveal that these conflicts are less a product of human and institutional pathology than they are an illustration, should we need one, of the complexity of the ongoing social negotiations needed to harmonize laws of men and laws of nature and to cut truth and justice to human measure” Golan, Tal. Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2004, p4. JohnV