Lynch2015
| Lynch2015 | |
|---|---|
| BibType | INCOLLECTION |
| Key | Lynch2015 |
| Author(s) | Michael Lynch |
| Title | Turning a witness: the textual and interactional production of a statement in adversarial testimony |
| Editor(s) | Baudouin Dupret, Michael Lynch, Tim Berard |
| Tag(s) | Law, Ethnomethodology |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Year | 2015 |
| Language | English |
| City | New York |
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| Pages | 163–189 |
| URL | Link |
| DOI | 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190210243.003.0008 |
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| Howpublished | |
| Book title | Law at Work: Studies in Legal Ethnomethods |
| Chapter | |
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the testimony of an expert witness in a highly publicized trial in a US Federal Court. The witness was a philosopher of science who testified in defense of a local school board’s mandate to inform high-school biology students about ‘intelligent design’ (ID), an arguably religious alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Although he testified in support of the legitimacy of ID, the witness was widely quoted (most notably by the judge in his ruling) as having inadvertently testified in support the adversary party’s arguments. This chapter examines how the plaintiff attorneys ‘turned’ this witness by using a series of written texts and oral testimonies to extract testimony supporting their own side’s arguments. The analysis shows how the practices of interrogation in this case involved an intricate working and reworking of written texts in a series of interactional exchanges between witnesses and interrogators.
Notes
