Court-Appointed Experts and Accuracy in Adversarial Litigation

Concerned about evidence distortion arising from litigants' strong incentive to misrepresent information to fact-finders, legal scholars and commentators have long suggested that the court appoint its own advisor for a neutral piece of information about the dispute. This paper studies the incentive problem faced by the litigants when the judge seeks advice from the court-appointed expert. Within a standard litigation game framework, we find a trade-off in utilizing the court-appointed expert: although it helps the judge obtain more information overall, thereby reducing the number of mistakes at trial, it hampers the litigants' incentive to supply expert information, which undermines the adversarial nature of the current American legal system.