The Role of the Forensic Expert in an Inquisitorial System

Abstract

As a forensic expert who is practicing in a country with what is traditionally described as an inquisitorial criminal law system, I have had relatively little professional experience with adversarial type justice systems. My perception of the expert’s role in the latter type of system is therefore necessarily largely based on what I have read about it in the scholarly literature as well as, inevitably, by what I have seen in factual and fictional accounts of the adversarial system at work. I am not however entirely destitute of hands-on experience of the role of the expert witness in an adversarial setting, as will appear from the following anecdote.