Expert evidence, judicial reasoning, and the family courts information pilot

The Family Courts Information Pilot made a modest step towards open justice in Children Act cases by publishing 160 judgments of the County Courts and Family Proceedings Courts. This article focuses on the reasoning about expert evidence in the judgements, drawing on the epistemology of testimony and the work of Habermas. The courts seek to provide publicly accessible justifications for the acceptance or rejection of expert testimony, and while they are reasonably successful in this task it is often difficult for them to justify a decision in the absence of independent expert evidence in addition to that of the social workers and Children’s Guardians. This supposed over-reliance on expert evidence has been heavily criticised by the Family Justice Review but reducing the use of experts may promote efficiency at the expense of justice