Commentary: Medical evidence-based law?

If you work, as I have, with both victims and perpetrators of traumatic events, then it is inevitable that at some point, you will be invited to participate in medicolegal processes that allocate either responsibility or redress for the injury caused. If participating as an expert witness, your contribution will be about the diagnosis, manifestation, and prognosis of mental illness, and your testimony will be expected to reflect reasonable medical practice, or what we might think of as “evidence-based medicine.” Adamou and Hale suggest that the law lags behind scientific evidence and is thus potentially unfair. I am going to argue against this position and suggest that the law does not follow medical evidence, but uses evidence in the pursuit of justice. In an adversarial system, the ethical purposes of law are different from those of medicine, and we should be worried if medical evidence becomes the arbiter of justice.