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Anthropological Witness tells the story of Alexander Laban Hinton's encounter with an accused architect of genocide and, more broadly, Hinton's attempt to navigate the promises and perils of expert testimony. In March 2016, Hinton served as an expert witness at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, an international tribunal established to try senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes committed during the 1975-79 Cambodian genocide. His testimony culminated in a direct exchange with Pol Pot's notorious right-hand man, Nuon Chea, who was engaged in genocide denial. Anthropological Witness looks at big questions about the ethical imperatives and epistemological assumptions involved in explanation and the role of the public scholar in addressing issues relating to truth, justice, social repair, and genocide. Hinton asks: Can scholars who serve as expert witnesses effectively contribute to international atrocity crimes tribunals where the focus is on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation? What does the answer to this question say more generally about academia and the public sphere? At a time when the world faces a multitude of challenges, the answers Hinton provides to such questions about public scholarship are urgent.

The chapter revisits theoretical issues through a contrast of the methods and epistemology of social science/anthropology and law. It looks at the synergies and discordances between the juridical production of a verdict and the author's disciplinary focus on explanation, context, and analysis. It also reconsiders the question of whether public scholars have a place in the courtroom and can contribute to international justice in a manner that can, even within the strict confines of legal procedure, provide important insights about major public issues like truth, justice, and genocide. The chapter details some of the major accomplishments of Nuon Chea's trial, ranging from the groundbreaking civil party participation to justice achieved at last for mass human rights violations. It stresses the importance of the trial to the victims, the rule of law, reconciliation, and deterrence.

This chapter tells the story of navigating the structures and constraints of law to make a pedagogical contribution to the process of justice. It reviews the author's experiences that raise important questions about whether and to what extent there is a place for the public scholar and anthropological witness in the courtroom. It also confirms whether scholars can serve as expert witnesses and effectively contribute to tribunals for international atrocity crimes, focusing on legal guilt as opposed to academic explanation. The chapter uses character development, providing background on and giving a sense of Nuon Chea, a key courtroom legal personnel. It highlights the anthropological ways of knowing or epistemological assumptions that provide anthropological witness in a court of law.

The literature on social science and public policy implicitly is based on a \"fixed differences\" model which maintains that the academic and policy spheres possess a set of static and mutually exlusive characteristics. The model yields the prediction that these between-sphere differences inevitably produce conflict for applied scholars. This study tested these predictions using data from interviews with social and educational scientists who had served as expert witnesses in school desegregation litigation. Findings indicate that the respondents' experiences of differences between the academic and legal spheres were not as prevalent as the fixed differences model suggests or as respondents anticipated. Moreover, between-sphere differences that were experienced did not necessarily yield conflict for experts. The results are more compatible with a \"dynamic model\" of applied scholarship that views the academic and policy spheres as possessing fluid and potentially overlapping characteristics. The dynamic model rejects the notion that applied scholarship inevitably is imbued with conflict due to fundamental between-sphere differences.