Dr. Joe Cecil

Dr. Joe Cecil is a fellow at the Civil Justice Research Initiative at UC Berkeley Law School. He recently retired from the Division of Research at the Federal Judicial Center, where he examined access to justice in federal district courts as a result of policy changes regarding the use of dispositive motions (motions to dismiss, summary judgment, etc.). His research in this area has been commissioned and relied upon by the advisory committees on federal rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States.

While at the Center, he also focused on the role of scientific evidence in federal courts, conducting empirical research projects on admissibility of scientific evidence in civil and criminal litigation and the role of court-appointed experts. Since 1990, he directed the Center’s Program on Scientific and Technical Evidence. As part of this program he developed the Center’s Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, and is collaborating on the development of the fourth edition of the Reference Manual, which will be published jointly by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academies.

He has been a member of the National Academies’ Committee on Science, Technology & Law since it began in 1998. He has been appointed as a member of a number of panels of the National Academy of Sciences, including recent service on panels issuing reports on eyewitness identification (Identifying the Culprit, 2014) and forensic science (Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States, 2009). He received his JD and a PhD in psychology from Northwestern University.