The issue of out-of-court settlement of disputes between participants in construction is considered. The relevance of the study stems from the excessive number of legal disputes of business entities. This fact requires a new perspective on the existing but still unpopular conciliation procedures, which can mitigate the burden of the judiciary. The mediation procedure seems to be the most attractive to the authors to that end. The article provides a range of advantages of turning the disputants to the mediator in comparison with the traditional judicial process. In this regard, the attention of the authors is focused on the mediator figure itself, the benefits of engaging an expert builder (a person competent in the field of construction who carries out forensic analysis on a permanent basis) are explained.

The question of whether the participants in the construction industry are ready to resolve their economic disputes in the pretrial order is considered. According to the authors this is obstructed by: persistent paternalism firmly entrenched in the minds of the disputing parties, traditional distrust to the mediator as not having the authority, the exhaustiveness of the parties’ desire for unquestionable victory in the dispute and not for a compromise the inefficiency of the defensive practice using concealment or falsification of information, etc.

In conclusion, the authors note the current unreadiness of the construction industry parties to actively participate in out-of-court settlement of disputes as well as a positive tendency among the Russian builders to using civilized forms of industrial interaction and express the hope that mediation will take its rightful place in the segment of public relations under consideration. 

The article aims to review the pressing issues of expert’s opinion validation in criminal cases related to investigation of safety rules violations in construction work and to find ways to resolve them. The following assessment criteria are addressed in the paper: expert’s qualification and competence, correctness of an expert’s opinion drafting, thoroughness and scientific validation of a research, coherence and correlation between findings and research part of an expert’s opinion, cogency of an opinion to an investigator (court) and other parties to the proceedings. Based on the expert practice analysis typical examples of problem situations related to validation of this type of expert’s opinions are given as well as the ways to resolve them are suggested and justified. The information presented may be of practical interest when preparing an evaluative judgement on an expert’s opinion on the category of cases in question.

The issues of an expert right of initiative when undertaking a study is very relevant to this day since there is still no proper legal regulation. The provisions of legislation on expert activities of the member States of the Eurasian Economic Union, the Model Law of the Eurasian Economic Community on forensic activities, as well as scientific positions on the nature, structure, exercise, limits and regulation of expert initiative are analyzed in the article. An opportunity to establish the expert initiative right by entitling him to submit petitions connected with appointment and production of forensic examination is examined. The author proposes to make additions to the existing legislation on forensic activities to enshrine the specific expert right to submit a range of petitions. For instance, to invite other experts to examination; to extend the term of examination; to change the wording of the issues for expertise preserving their semantic content in the decision on the appointment of an examination, to withdraw permission for a proceedings participant to attend an examination if he obstructs the work of an expert. As a possible way to reduce the time and financial costs to resolute the expert’s petitions an exemplary order of their submission in electronic form is proposed.

Theoretical provisions concerning the subject of forensic vehicle inspections, their objects and tasks, investigatory techniques are still not developed in forensic and expert literature. Based on a review of investigative and expert practice, professional literature, synthesis of scientific opinions a classification is offered for diagnostic tasks of forensic vehicle inspections to establish: technical condition of vehicles; trajectory and characteristics of their movement; conditions of transport communication lines; reasons, mechanism and circumstances of a road traffic accident; the circumstances preceding a road traffic accident as well as related to assessment of actions of the workers responsible for service and repair of a vehicle to ascertain a possibility to prevent an accident. Situational tasks are given special consideration.

The article describes new possibilities for technical authentication of audio recordings and determination of circumstances in which they were made in the context of Russian forensic practice. The proposed method is based on comparing the frequency of the electric current in the grid reflected in the submitted audio evidence with reference electric network frequency (ENF) indicators, which are recorded on a regular basis using a specialized hardware and software suite. This method is known as the Electric Network Frequency (ENF) Criterion (developed by Romanian expert Catalin Grigoras in 2005) and has been used by forensic practitioners around the world since 2009. The paper discusses the substance of the method, its possibilities and limitations, and demonstrates its practical value in helping to establish whether an audio recording was tampered with, as well as the date and time it was made. The article is intended for experts as a summary of the method, and for investigators to familiarize themselves with the new possibilities of scientific methodology.

The content of a forensic handwriting expert’s opinion has been holding attention of both research scientists and practicing experts for many decades now since it is not only an essential evidence in court often being crucial to deciding on a case but also a document bringing together procedural and scientific methodological elements.   

Forensic handwriting examination is much in demand for court, it is also profoundly and comprehensively developed, supported by detailed methodological recommendations on drafting and processing of an expert’s opinion. However, the analysis of experts’ opinions from state forensic institutions as well as from non-state brought to light several shortcomings which do not enhance their evidentiary status. This applies in particular to performing the forensic examination by non-state experts who tend to lack competence. At the same time the number of forensic handwriting examinations assigned by court to the non-state forensic institutions prevails significantly.

The most common mistakes made by the handwriting experts when drafting opinions are reviewed in the article, some ways to resolve them are proposed. The need to provide methodological recommendations for forensic handwriting experts incorporating current requirements to the experts’ opinions is acknowledged. 

The extremist statements are diverse and can be classified in a range of aspects: semantic, pragmatic and rhetorical. Analysis of expert practice enables to distinguish two semantic classes: statements about national/religious group and statements about nationalist ideology. In terms of pragmatism the statements are divided into the following types: calls for action against a group; statements about actions against a group and negative attitude to it; humiliation of group members; threat to group members. Apart from that constative statements are divided into two subgroups depending on their rhetorical structure: evaluative statements and statements containing justification for negative judgments. The content and pragmatic signs of “extremist” contexts can be found in various combinations limited by the features of a communicative situation. The article summarises expert practice on the study of extremist statements uttered primarily during interpersonal domestic disputes. It is shown that the variety of statements can be reduced to a finite list of features which are a special subject of the research.

In some cases, the material provided for a forensic vehicle examination may be insufficient to answer the questions placed before the experts. However, sometimes there are some multimedia files presented which by means of forensic video examination can help to discover the information missing for implementation of the vehicle expertise. This article reviews the potential of forensic video and vehicle investigations when conducting an integrated research including the investigation of circumstances of a road traffic accident. The examples from the state experts’ practice of the forensic institutions of the Russian Ministry of Justice are provided. This review is intended to introduce the video experts and the vehicle experts to the opportunities there are in the integrated research of the mechanism of road accidents.

Forensic vehicle examination is one of the most demanded examination types in the state forensic institutions of the Russian Ministry of Justice.

Forensic vehicle examination is based on the core sciences such as physics, mathematics, classical mechanics, theory of a vehicle etc. as well as on criminalistics, provisions and norms of criminal, civil, arbitration and administrative law. Based on  the kinematics and dynamics laws and theorems of a material object movement, key techniques and methodological recommendations on conducting forensic vehicle examination were developed. However, these techniques cannot be applied in cases when values of relevant parameters which are a part of the mathematical model are absent. Although the latest advances in science have made it now possible to identify the movement parameters of those involved in a road traffic accident by examining new objects. Some examples of using such objects in practice are given in the article, for instance of the satellite tracking system, different types of video fixation, supplemental restraint system (SRS) in a car. 

 The results of validation of the method “Microscopic analysis of textile fibers” used in forensic fiber examination are presented. An attempt is made to estimate reliability of testing of this method numerically by the proportions of right and false results and credibility ratio.

The testing method under consideration consists in establishing a set of external characteristics of natural and chemical textile fibers: color, peculiarities of coloration, morphological features, presence/absence of a matting agent. These generic characteristics are used in forensic textile analysis. 

As the objects of testing fiber samples from comparative collection of a forensic fiber laboratory were used. Four experts participated in the experiment independently examining eleven fiber samples by eleven external characteristics for a week.

A low (2,2 %) rate of false results in relation to the total number of tests was established as well as the low (less than 3,0 %) rate of each expert’s false results. The probability of the right results of characteristics’ assessment is 30 times higher than the probability of false results.

The results of the experiment permit the conclusion that the method is suitable to be used in forensic fiber examination when dealing with various tasks: classification, identification, situational and diagnostic.  

The issues are considered concerning the standardization of forensic activities legal regulation enabling to create an effective transition mechanism to move to a new forensic technological level in our country. The need to implement the international regulations to the national legal system to standardise this activity is highlighted. In forensic activity, it is necessary to apply the new standards for conformity assessment of such principles as the of impartiality and confidentiality. The definitions of these principles are analysed, the conformity assessment requirements for persons involved in conducting forensic investigations are elucidated. The activity of the chief executive of a forensic organization is analysed in the conditions of application the international conformity assessment standards for the mentioned principles as well as his function in managing the institution and personnel.

The question of whether it is appropriate to classify genetic examinations of kinship as a medical service is considered in the article. Establishment of identity of an unknown individual (alive or dead) with a specific person is a classic example of forensic medical genetic examination. At the same time an examination on establishment of biological kinship of people whose identity is known and doesn’t demand identification cannot be classified as an identificational. That is the study of human DNA to establish kinship cannot be referred to as a class of medical examinations. Forensic medical examination (including genetic) is a type of medical activity which is carried out by a medical organization and therefore needs licensing. However, if an examination is not carried out in a medical organization and there is no word “medical” in the name such an examination cannot be considered as a medical activity and doesn’t need licensing exactly as it is arranged in expert institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation at this point. Such examinations can be considered as a type of forensic biological expertise.

The article is devoted to the analysis of one of the rights forming the procedural status of a forensic expert, that is the right of expert initiative. The right is considered not only from a procedural point of view, but also in the context of professional, moral and ethical standards that should guide a forensic expert in his activities. The right of expert initiative is considered as a professional responsibility of an expert. From the perspective of legal hermeneutics an attempt is made to identify its direct recipient and more importantly - the form of realization of this right by the expert. The norm in question is examined within the context of regulatory legal acts and in this connection, we try to understand the content of this norm considering the basic principle of forensic expert activity - the objectivity principle and the complementary principles of comprehensiveness and completeness of a research. The question is raised of the mandatory nature of the norm for the expert regardless of the procedural form of its implementation.

Illicit use of intellectual property violates the rights of the person/company that owns it. The expertise of intellectual property in many ways helps to restore justice in cases of rights violation. To conduct such expertise the knowledge of not only the intellectual property rights is required, but also of the activity to which the disputed intellectual property belongs. The article discusses some approaches to assessment of the market value of intellectual property, for instance it is assumed that when calculating the discount rate of intellectual property (for example, a brand), a company’s weighted average cost of capital (WACC) can be used. A hypothesis is substantiated that the methodology for determining discount rates using the “traditional” approach, when the discount rate takes all risks into account and is applied to the most probable values of the income measure, is based on the direct observations on the capital value market for a business. It is noted that the discount rate for intangible assets not necessarily should differ from that for a business. Thus, WACC assessment method is a discount rate for the invested capital. The method of estimating the discount rate based on WACC, shows the rate of return to be paid for the use of investment capital. The latter may consist of two sources of financing: own capital and debt capital. The article provides a thorough and detailed analysis of the WACC and notes that it can be used in both financial and investment analysis to assess future returns on investments, considering the initial conditions for profitability of investment capital.