Resource Document on Peer Review of Expert Testimony

Approved by the Board of Trustees, December 1996

The American legal system seeks justice through the adversarial process. The adversarial process, by its very nature, tends to highly polarize ideas. At times psychiatrists who testify as expert witnesses in court or similar settings have been perceived in the popular, legal and medical literature as either deficient in knowledge or to have knowingly behaved in an unethical manner to advance the cause of the party who hired them.(1-6) Sometimes these perceptions are not accurate. Other times they are true. This paper attempts to outline the problem and discuss possible solutions.