2021 Livia Holden, (ed.), Faire Justice dans les Sociétés Multiculturelles, Special Issue on Les Cahiers de la Justice 2021/01

Expert cross-cultural knowledge is proving crucial to dispute resolution in increasingly diverse societies for protecting disadvantaged social groups and ensuring substantial access to justice. In the first paper, available here, Livia Holden surveys the conceptualisation of cultural expertise in the socio-legal sciences, reviews the use of cultural expertise in a selected number of European countries where EURO-EXPERT conducted the research and offers a preliminary overview of findings on cultural expertise in Europe, with a specific section focusing on France.

2020 Livia Holden, (ed.), Forum: Cultural Expertise, Law and History Review Cambridge, Vol. 38, Issue 1, February 2020

The forum is an outcome of the workshop titled Cultural Expertise in Ancient and Modern History, convened by EURO-EXPERT, in Oxford in July 2018. It aims to make explicit the interdisciplinary components of Cultural Expertise from a historiographical perspective in order to open up the discussion to the history of law.

2019 Livia Holden, (ed.), Cultural Expertise: An Emergent Concept and Evolving Practices, Special Issue Laws 2019

This book offers descriptions of judicial practices involving cultural experts and surveys of the most frequent fields of expert witness that are related with culture. In addition, it interrogates who the experts are and outlines their links with local communities and that with the courts and the state power and politics; how cultural expert witnessing has been received by judges; how cultural expertise has developed across the sister disciplines of history and psychiatry. Finally, the book asks whether academic truth and legal truth are commensurable across time and space, in order to argue for a closer intersectoral collaboration among socio-legal experts and the legal profession and a greater transparency in the practice of cultural expertise.

2019 Austin Sarat, (ed.), Cultural Expertise and Socio-Legal Studies, Special Issue Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 78, Emerald, USA

In this book, socio-legal scientists with interdisciplinary backgrounds scrutinize the applicability of the notion of cultural expertise in Europe and the rest of the world. Cases include murder, female genital mutilation, earthquake claims, Islamic law, underage marriages, child custody, adoption, land rights, and asylum. The authors debate on a variety of themes, such as legal pluralism, ethnicity, causal determinism, reification of culture, and the “culturalization” of defendants. The book concludes with an overview of the ethical implications of the definition of cultural expertise and suggestions for a way forward.

2011 Livia Holden (ed), Cultural Expertise and Litigation: Patterns, Conflicts, Narratives, Routledge, London

This book addresses the role of social scientists as a source of expert evidence, and is a product of their experiences and observations of cases involving litigants of South Asian origin. What is meant in court by “culture,” “custom” and “law”? How are these concepts understood by witnesses, advocates, judges and litigants? How far are cross-cultural understandings facilitated – or obscured – in the process? What strategies are adopted? And which ones turn out to be successful in court? How is cultural understanding – and misunderstanding – produced in these circumstances? And how, moreover, do the decisions in these cases not only reflect, but impact, upon the law and the legal procedure? The book addresses these questions, as it elicits the patterns, conflicts and narratives that characterize the legal role of social scientists in a variety of de facto plural settings – including immigration and asylum law, family law, citizenship law and criminal law.