Professor Imwinkelried Lectures for China University of Political Science and Law

On April 26, together with Vanderbilt Law Professor Edward Cheng, Professor Emeritus Ed Imwinkelried inaugurated a new lecture series for the evidence faculty and students at China University of Political Science and Law. 

The topic was deference to experts. In a recent article, Cheng argued that the courts should always defer to an expert consensus on a scientific question. Imwinkelried pointed out that doing so would sometimes result in a miscarriage of justice; he pointed to numerous instances in which an expert consensus was at odds with the available empirical data. He also noted that adopting a categorical consensus rule would reduce the incentive of the forensic sciences to conduct the validation research that is long overdue.