Historian - Objective Historian

Objective Historian

During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial it became evident that the court need to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". This was necessary so that there would be a legal bench mark with which to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the methods employed by David Irving, as before the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian.

Justice Charles Gray leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practice by holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies.

In summarising Gray's judgement, in an article published in the Yale Law Journal, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:

1. She must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
2. she must not dismiss counterevidence without scholarly consideration;
3. she must be even-handed in her treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
4. she must clearly indicate any speculation;
5. she must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
6. she must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict her favored view; and
7. she must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.

Schneider uses the concept of the "objective historian" to suggest that this could be used as an aid in assessing what makes a historian suitable to be an expert witnesses under the Daubert standard in the United States. Schneider proposed this, because, in her opinion, Irving could have passed the standard Daubert tests unless a court was given "a great deal of assistance from historians".

Schneider proposes that by testing a historian against the criteria of the "objective historian" then, even if a historian holds specific political views (and she gives an example of a well-qualified historian's testimony that was disregarded by a United States court because he was a member of a feminist group), providing the historian uses the "objective historian" standards, he or she is a "conscientious historian". It was Irving's failure as an "objective historian" not his right wing views that caused him to loose his libel case, as a "conscientious historian" would not have "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to support his political views.