Expert witness activity supports the legal system significantly. The court cases today are complex in nature and they require the resolution of scientific or technical questions. Ex- pert opinions can be invaluable tools for clarifying issues of fact and building a case. They help jurors understand complex and nuanced information, they provide a sense of objectivity and credibility, and they integrate with the legal team to enhance the strength of the entire case. The experts reflect their own knowledge and qualification which is formed based on their education or special training on a particular subject that may be beyond the understanding of the average person.

This book has been organized two parts with the basic aim being to share experiences in expert witnessing and to establish an inter-Balkan academic cooperation in forensic sciences scientific techniques and the adaptation of the best practices in the discipline in crime combating are being discussed.

Within that scope, scientists from different expertise areas of forensic sciences have been contributed to the topic which we entitled “Best Practices in Expert Witnessing: Balkan Countries Experience”. The participants consist of very well-known scientists from Balkans mainly Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, and Turkey which basically practice expert witnessing in their own fields.

Forensic Scientists or Legal Medicine experts form the natural “expert witnessing” team for case identifications. Therefore, the first part of this book entitled “Expert Witnessing as a Profession (medico-legal approach)” covers cases and/opinions or Legal Medicine specialists. To understand the extremely wide variety of the subjects that this topic is related to, you can just take a look at the contents where you can see chapters related to practicing expert witnessing in various countries (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey) as well as specific approaches to expert witnessing like ethics and standardization issues.

Although expert witnesses are viewed as positive contributors there are numerous cases where they can be uncapable or in certain cases liars or “hired guns”. A Bulgarian approach to this issue can be seen by the “malpractice” touch.

Finally, as expert witnessing is a widely inter and multi-disciplinary field, we included anesthesiology and radiology to- gether with genetics in the second part of the book entitled “Ex- pert Witnessing within a Specialty (multidisciplinary-forensic approach)”

We all hope that this book will open a debate on expert witnessing for future practice and policy and will be a step forward to establish an inter-Balkan academic cooperation in forensic sciences for scientific techniques in crime combating.