A Study On The Expert Witness In Maritime Litigation

Nowadays, when science and technology are so developed, the maritime litigation is relating to lots of professional technologies, which play very important part in the success for the cases. As a legal system, the system of expert witness is very useful to the reform of the evidence system of maritime litigation, especially the system of Maritime Judicial Expertise. The system existing in China belongs to the Civil law system, that is, emphasize inquisition of witness system and judge plays a leading role in law suits. These regulations undoubtedly have lots of unreasonable elements. The system of expert witness is based on adversary system, emphasize the role that applicant and defendant play in law suits, which has more advantage compared with Chinese legislation. Further more, some specific questions have not been embodied in Chinese law because our legislation is too general and unpractical. As a result, the judgement of some cases is unfair. In author's point of view, we could make use of the system of expert witness and at the same time, refuse its flaws.Taking the introduction of the witness system in common law system as a cut-in, firstly, this paper analyzed the concept and character of the expert witness and the legislation status, discussed the latest development in Britain and its limitation and contradiction in many ways including the law-economics to find out the solutions to solve the problems.Then, the author did some analyses of the concrete embodiment of the expert system in China from the aspects of civil-action and marine-litigation separately and talked about the system's rationality with stress to prove the necessity of introducing the system into China.In the last part, the author made some connections between the expert-witness system and our country's maritime judicial authenticate, discussed the principle of inducting the expert-witness system to reform the maritime judicial authenticate system and the handicap that might exist and brought forward some basic thoughts of reforming maritime judicial authenticate system to improve the development ment of the maritime judicial authenticate system in China.