As a practicing attorney, I had to giggle when I read Sandy's statement that an attorney believes he or she can become an expert in any area after a weekend of hard study. That is certainly true. Of course, attorneys rely on a hired expert to give him or her expertise in a short period of time, which, obviously, leaves the attorney subject to all of the bias and faults of the educating expert. But back to Eugene's point - the great thing about this listserv is that in general we deal with substantive areas of law and how the nuances of law apply to facts. We don't spend alot of time addressing whether a given fact is true or untrue. If we spend our limited time debating factual issues, this list will lose one of the key ingredients that makes reading these post time well spent.
Gene Summerlin Ogborn, Summerlin & Ogborn, P.C. 210 Windsor Place 330 South 10th St. Lincoln, NE 68508 402.434.8040 402.434.8044 (FAX) 402.730.5344 (Mobile) www.osolaw.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: Discussion list for con law professors [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Levinson Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 8:13 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: From the list custodian Lynne writes: With all due respect to Eugene and Sandy's posts, I do think there are members of this list who have expertise on "facts", bodies of literature in other disciplines, etc. I have no doubt that Lynne is correct. But, insofar as we want to have a "meta" discussion (and maybe we don't, for very good reasons), it remains unclear exactly how one identifies someone who possesses "expertise"--is explicit graduate traing required, e.g.?--and, even more to the point, how one adjudicates conflicts between two people each of whom claims equal expertise. (This is slightly off topic, but I recall many people a couple of years ago who said that it didn't matter that Gov. Bush had no knowledge whatsoever of foreign policy because, after all, he'd be able to rely on "expert advisors." What they didn't acknowledge is that the "experts" might disagree, and then we'd be depending on Bush's .... (what, instincts, newly developed expertise, ....?)). Mark Tushnet many years ago coined the notion of "the lawyer as astrophysicist," by which he referred to the lawyer's tendency to believe that he/she could become an expert on *anything* given a weekend of hard study (though, of course, almost no lawyers believed that a non-lawyer could become an expert in less than three years of law school!). It is not false modesty that leads me, as I get older, to be more aware of what I don't know about facts in the world than what I do. sandy
