Scientific truth and legal truth

Journal title SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO
Author/s Catherine Hochart
Publishing Year 2013 Issue 2013/1 Language French
Pages 16 P. 109-124 File size 214 KB
DOI 10.3280/SD2013-001008
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This article analyses legal proceedings as a device that is used to apply law in the name of truth, increasingly raising questions of a technical nature, whose solutions call for specialised knowledge that the judge does not necessarily possess himself. In such cases, the judge calls in a technical expert, who may determine the value of a piece of real property, for example, or measure the degree of disability of a victim of a road accident. The expert and the judge thus operate actively together to search out the truth. But while the former focuses on the technical and scientific truth of the facts, the latter tries to determine the judicial truth of the case in hand. The expert plays the part of the "judge" of the facts, while the judge, for his part, concerns himself with the law. Nevertheless, the expert sometimes plays a more important role than the one attributed to him by the law, in particular in constructing the judges’ beliefs

Keywords: Truth, Proceedings, Judge, Expert, Proof ,Law and science

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Catherine Hochart, Vérité scientifique et vérité judiciaire in "SOCIOLOGIA DEL DIRITTO " 1/2013, pp 109-124, DOI: 10.3280/SD2013-001008