Professor Paul Roberts was one of seven keynote plenary speakers at the Seventh International Conference on Evidence Law and Forensic Science (ICELFS), hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, between 31 July and 2 August 2019. Professor Roberts presented a paper on "Evidence Law's Presumption of Innocence".
ICELFS is the primary, biennial meeting of the International Association of Evidence Science (IAES), which was founded in 2007 as a collaborative venture between Professor Ron Allen (Northwestern Law School, Chicago) and Professor Baosheng Zhang (China University of Political Science and Law, Beijing). IAES aims to promote research, education, law reform and policy-making in the broadly based interdisciplinary field of 'evidence science', encompassing evidence and procedural law and the forensic sciences.
The Seventh ICELFS was the first on European soil, previous meetings having been held in Beijing, Adelaide and Baltimore. More than eighty delegates, drawn from six continents, gathered to hear over forty presentations covering a diversity of topics spanning scientific and technological developments, evidentiary regulation, theories of evidence and proof, constitutional frameworks, human rights, policing and the administration of domestic criminal justice systems, transnational cooperation and international criminal justice.
Professor Roberts' most recent book on Forensic Science Evidence and Expert Witness Testimony: Reliability Through Reform? (edited with Professor Michael Stockdale, Northumbria Law School) addresses many of the central themes debated in Freiburg and at previous ICELFS meetings. A recent review by Dr Alex Biedermann (Lausanne) describes this work as "thought-provoking and far-reaching…. a primary, authoritative and up-to-date reference": (2019) 82 Modern Law Review 772, 775.
Posted on Friday 9th August 2019