This summer, Patrick Garon-Sayegh, professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Montreal, will spend weeks immersed in hundreds of pages of court transcripts. His field of research is neither in a laboratory nor in a hospital, but in the verbatim exchanges of medical liability trials.
Through the detailed analysis of three cases heard in Quebec and Ontario, he will seek to better understand how the courts evaluate medical work, how medical experts criticize each other and how scientific knowledge is translated into legal language.
Reading trials as argumentation laboratories
Patrick Garon-Sayegh's project is part of a long-term research program on professional misconduct and expertise. For the professor, medical liability trials constitute particularly rich terrain.
“The doctors being prosecuted are themselves experts: a doctor accused of having committed a mistake does not cease to be a doctor because he finds himself before the courts,” he says. The doctor can therefore defend his conduct by mobilizing his own expertise, alongside expert witnesses called by both parties. “In the simplest case, we have three expert voices: the accused doctor, the defense expert and the plaintiff’s expert,” summarizes Professor Garon-Sayegh.
His job will consist of carefully reading the transcripts of the hearings... which sometimes extended over five to eight days of trial. He is particularly interested in the testimony of experts, the questions asked by lawyers and the way in which complex medical reasoning is reformulated to be understood by judges who, without being doctors, must decide whether the medical work carried out in the case was adequate or not.
“Traditional legal work above all gives us access to finished products: laws and judgments. I look at what happens before, all the argumentation work which then makes the legal decision possible,” he mentions.