The Proficiency of Experts

Expert evidence plays a crucial role in civil and criminal litigation. Changes in the rules concerning expert admissibility, following the Supreme Court\u27s Daubert ruling, strengthened judicial review of the reliability and the validity of an expert\u27s methods. Judges and scholars, however, have neglected the threshold question for expert evidence: whether a person should be qualified as an expert in the first place. Judges traditionally focus on credentials or experience when qualifying experts without regard to whether those criteria are good proxies for true expertise. We argue that credentials and experience are often poor proxies for proficiency. Qualification of an expert presumes that the witness can perform in a particular domain with a proficiency that non-experts cannot achieve, yet many experts cannot provide empirical evidence that they do in fact perform at high levels of proficiency. To demonstrate the importance ofproficiency data, we collect and analyze two decades of proficiency testing of latent fingerprint examiners. In this important domain, we found surprisingly high rates of false positive identifications for the period 1995 to 2016. These data would qualify the claims of many fingerprint examiners regarding their near infallibility, but unfortunately, judges do not seek out such information. We survey the federal and state case law and show how judges typically accept expert credentials as a proxy for proficiency in lieu of direct proof of proficiency. Indeed, judges often reject parties\u27 attempts to obtain and introduce at trial empirical data on an expert\u27s actual proficiency. We argue that any expert who purports to give falsifiable opinions can be subjected to proficiency testing and that proficiency testing is the only objective means of assessing the accuracy and reliability ofexperts who rely on subjective judgments to formulate their opinions (so-called black-box experts ). Judges should use proficiency data to make expert qualification decisions when the data is available, should demand proof of proficiency before qualifying black-box experts, and should admit at trial proficiency data for any qualified expert. We seek to revitalize the standard for qualifying experts: expertise should equal proficiency

Harmful Freedom of Choice: Lessons from the Cellphone Market

This article focuses on the relationship between provider and customer, specifically on the complexity of available contracts in the cellphone market and the ways this complexity might be harmful to consumers. This article aims to elucidate the issues, fleshing them out both as a general phenomenon and as a specific implementation in the cellphone context. The aim is not to provide ultimate solutions, but to show the directions these solutions might take and the difficulties involved

The Place of Religion in Human Rights Law: Distinguishing Freedom of Religion from the Right against Religious Discrimination

This paper argues that, while they are often conflated, the right to freedom of religion and the right against religious discrimination are in fact distinct human rights. Religious freedom is best understood as protecting our interest in religious adherence (and non-adherence), understood from the committed perspective of the (non)adherent. The right against religious discrimination is best understood as protecting our non-committal interest in the unsaddled membership of our religious group. Thus understood, the two rights have distinct normative rationales. Key doctrinal implications follow for the respective scope of the two rights, whether they may be claimed against non-state actors, and their divergent assessment of religious establishment. These differences reveal a complex map of two overlapping, but conceptually distinct, human rights which are not necessarily breached simultaneously

Objective and subjective assessment of perceptual factors in HDR content processing

The development of the display and camera technology makes high dynamic range (HDR) image become more and more popular. High dynamic range image give us pleasant image which has more details that makes high dynamic range image has good quality. This paper shows us the some important techniques in HDR images. And it also presents the work the author did. The paper is formed of three parts. The first part is an introduction of HDR image. From this part we can know why HDR image has good quality

Experts, Mental States, and Acts

This article, written for a symposium on Guilt v. Guiltiness: Are the Right Rules for Trying Factual Innocence Inevitably the Wrong Rules for Trying Culpability?, argues that the definition of expertise in the criminal justice system, derived in the federal courts and in most states from Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Co., should vary depending on whether the issue involved is past mental state or past conduct. While expert psychological testimony about past acts ought to be based on scientifically verifiable assertions, expert psychological testimony about subjective mental states relevant to criminal responsibility need not meet the same threshold. This stance derives from the interplay between what I call the right to voice and a necessity rationale. The right to voice derives from the Constitution, which can be read to give criminal defendants a break whenever they want to present expert testimony. But respect for Daubert and scientific epistemology counsels that this bow to the defense should occur only when a scientific approach is not possible. Such an approach *is* futile with respect to opinion testimony about past mental state, so a relaxed evidentiary standard should govern there. However, when, as with past act testimony, the necessity argument is weak, Daubert should apply with full force