Over the past decade, a growing number of complaints have been made against Australian education authorities over the language of instruction used to teach deaf children. The complaints, made under the "Disability Discrimination Act", were lodged with the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission for investigation and possible conciliation. When conciliation failed, two of these cases continued to the Federal Court of Australia. An analysis of court transcripts and the determinations made by the Federal Court is presented in this paper. The focus of analysis is the way in which researchers who appeared as expert witnesses in these cases were positioned by counsels for the respondents. Foremost among the findings was the way in which researchers, whose work challenged the approach taken by the education authorities, were represented as being political.