Expert testimony by linguists in U.S. courts

An illustrative case of practices

Resumo

This article describes procedures surrounding expert testimony in U.S. federal courts, exemplifying with details of an expert’s experience in one case. The exemplar is a civil (not criminal) case brought for defamation, tried to a jury in
a federal district court, and subsequently appealed to a higher court. The article discusses reasons for which attorneys retain expert linguists, why courts welcome experts when their testimony is deemed helpful in deciding a disputed fact but exclude them if they are not qualified or the profered testimony is deemed insuficiently helpful or possibly prejudicial to a jury. The article concludes with observations about the pros and cons of serving as a linguistics expert in contested legal matters in an adversarial system.