CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Petrovic, Vladimir Ljubomir |
|---|---|
| Title | Historians as Expert Witnesses in the Age of Extremes |
| Summary | The thesis Historians as Expert Witnesses in the Age of Extremes aims to contribute to the understanding of the role of historical expertise in diverse legal contexts of the 20th century. The thesis argues that current discussions on the topic are both burdened by a holistic approach and confined in particularized national and topical frames. Hence they barely grasp effectively the variety of manifestations of historians’ courtroom performance, its connection towards the role of the experts in other branches of scholarship and the specific aspects of (in)compatibilities generated by the tangled relation between history and law. In order to contribute to the refocusing of the debate, on the basis of representative clusters of cases, the thesis aspires to reconfigure the field by replacing current perceptions of the practice with nuanced differentiations between the diversity of historical expertise during the course of the age of extremes. To that end, it searches for epistemological and genealogical preconditions of historians’ appearance in the courtroom and scrutinizes the institutionalization of the practice in different jurisdictions in the postwar period. Dominant paradigms of institutionalized historical expert witnessing are examined, as well as problematizatons surrounding their amalgamation. The complexities of contemporary historical expertise are further explored through examples which evade the debated paradigms by transgressing the boundaries of particular legal systems and pose the questions of universal relevance both to lawyers and historians in the process of the internationalization of historical expert witnessing. |
| Supervisor | Rev, Istvan |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/hphpev01.pdf |
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