Do you have juries?We have no jury at all. Most cases are heard by one judge, but we can also have three judges. ... In complex civil and criminal cases there are three judges, and two of them can be specialists -- for example, plumbers, engineers, or medical doctors. These expert judges are not lawyers.
These people serve as expert witnesses?
No, they aren't expert witnesses in the American sense -- we have no expert witnesses per se. These specialists are called by the court, and they play almost the same role in the procedure as the full-time judges.
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Expertise in Iceland
Editors, Justice in Iceland (Interview with Judge Tomas Magnusson), 8 Green Bag (2d Series) 393, 395 (2005):
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5 comments:
That's insane.
So two plumbers can essentially overrule a judge trained in law on a question of legal procedure or evidence. This means that procedure and the rules of evidence are not assigned the same weight in Iceland's justice system as they are here in the US.
In countries that have this system -- i.e., one professional judge and two lay judges (or assessors) -- the usual complaint is that the lay judges are too subservient to the professional judge. There must be various reasons for this -- e.g., the manner in which lay judges are selected -- but part of the explanation for lay subservience may be cultural, and it is entirely possible that in the U.S. the lay judges would commandeer the proceedings too often.
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