Editing Historian (section)

===Legal cases===
During the ''[[Irving v Penguin Books Ltd|Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt]]'' trial, the court relied on Richard Evan's witness report which mentioned "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]]".{{sfn|Schneider|2001|p=1531}} This was necessary so that there would be a legal benchmark to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the illegitimate 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.{{sfn|Schneider|2001|p=1531}}

[[Charles Gray (English judge)|Justice Gray]] leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, [[Richard J. Evans]], who compared [[Historical revisionism (negationism)#Techniques|illegitimate distortion of the historical record]] practiced by [[Holocaust denier]]s with established historical methodologies.{{sfn|Schneider|2001|p=1534}}

By summarizing Gray's judgment, in an article published in the ''[[Yale Law Journal]]'', Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:{{sfn|Schneider|2001|pp=1534, 1535}}
{{blockquote|
#The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
#The historian must not dismiss counter-evidence without scholarly consideration;
#The historian must be even-handed in treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
#The historian must clearly indicate any speculation;
#The historian must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
#The historian must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict their favored view; and
#The historian must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.
}}

Schneider uses the concept of the "objective historian" to suggest that this could be an aid in assessing what makes a historian suitable as expert witnesses under the [[Daubert standard]] in the [[United States]]. Schneider proposed this, because, in her opinion, Irving could not have passed the standard Daubert tests unless a court was given "a great deal of assistance from historians".{{sfn|Schneider|2001|pp=1534, 1538}}

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, they are a "conscientious historian". It was Irving's failure as an "objective historian" not his right-wing views that caused him to lose his libel case, as a "conscientious historian" would not have "deliberately misrepresented and manipulated historical evidence" to support his political views.{{sfn|Schneider|2001|pp=15333, 1539}}