ABSTRACT
The juxtaposition of fingerprint identification and art connoisseurship in the case of the disputed Jackson Pollock caught an eye for reason: its uncanny echoing of events surrounding a different Judge Pollak. As fingerprint identification became increasingly familiar and increasingly taken for granted in the courts, a curious ambiguity arose about whether fingerprint evidence was 'opinion' evidence. Legal scholars were shocked and disappointed to discover that scientific evidence, far from bringing a burst of clarity to questions of fact, tended to confuse matters even more. This chapter argues that two general streams of thought have coexisted within the fingerprint community: technical rhetoric and point standard. The legal parallel to the argument that each fingerprint analysis was a scientific experiment was the claim that each criminal trial was a scientific experiment testing the accuracy of the fingerprint examiner's source attribution. The Government's Memorandum was an extraordinary document in the degree to which it diminishes the expert knowledge claims of forensic fingerprint identification.
