Special Issue

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, USA. He is also a Five College Fortieth Anniversary Professor. He has written, co-written, or edited more than fifty books in the fields of law and political science.

• Introduction; Leila Rodriguez 1. Expert Witnessing in Honduran Asylum Cases: What Difference Can Twenty Years Make?; James Phillips 2. Judicial Ethnocentrism vs Expert Witnesses in Asylum Cases; Murray J. Leaf 3. Guilt, Innocence, Informant; Jeffrey Cohen and Lexine Trask 4. Traversing Boundaries: Anthropology, Political Asylum and The Provision of Expert Witness; Kathleen Gallagher 5. Proving "Race" Identity of Chinese Indonesian Asylum Seekers; ChorSwang Ngin 6. State Your Case: Best Practices for Presenting a Cultural Defense in Criminal Litigation; Heather Crabbe, Esq.

Anthropologists explore the use of cultural expert testimony as evidence in legal conflicts that invoke cultural difference. They address knowing the role of expert testimony in a cultural defense, reconciling the job of expert witness with other professional roles, relating to defendants versus informants, employing legal concepts that have little anthropological acceptance, producing testimony in changing historical and political contexts, and helping judges understand culture.