Genetic information is increasingly used in many contexts, including health, insurance, policing and sentencing—with numerous potential benefits and risks. Protecting from the related risks requires updates to laws and procedures by justice systems. These updates depend to a large extent on what the key stakeholders—the judiciary—know and think about the use of genetic information. This study used a battery of 25 genetic knowledge items to collect data from 73 supreme court judges from the same country (Romania) on their knowledge of genetic information. Their responses were compared with those of two other groups: lawyers (but not judges; N = 94) and non-lawyers (N = 116) from the same country. The data were collected at approximately the same time from the three groups. The judges’ results were also compared to the results obtained from a general population data collection (N = 5310). The results showed that: (1) judges had overall better knowledge of genetics than the other groups, but their knowledge was uneven across different genetic concepts; (2) judges were overall more confident in their knowledge than the other two groups, but their confidence was quite low; and (3) the correlation between knowledge and confidence was moderate for judges, weak for lawyers and not significant for non-lawyers. Finally, 100% of the judges agreed that information on gene-environment processes should be included in judges’ training. Increasing genetic expertise of the justice stakeholders is an important step towards achieving adequate legal protection against genetic data misuse.

遗传信息在包括健康，保险，警务和判决在内的许多情况下越来越多地被使用，具有许多潜在的利益和风险。防范相关风险要求司法系统更新法律和程序。这些更新在很大程度上取决于关键的利益相关者（司法机构）对遗传信息的了解和思考。这项研究使用了25个遗传知识项目，从同一国家（罗马尼亚）的73名最高法院法官收集了他们的遗传信息知识数据。他们的回答与其他两个小组的回答进行了比较：律师（但不是法官；N  = 94）和非律师（N = 116）。大约在同一时间从三组中收集数据。还将法官的结果与从总体人口数据收集中获得的结果进行比较（N = 5310）。结果表明：（1）法官总体上具有比其他群体更好的遗传学知识，但是在不同的遗传学概念上他们的知识是不均衡的；（2）法官总体上对自己的知识比其他两组更有信心，但他们的信心很低；（3）法官的知识与信心之间的相关性中等，对律师而言则较弱，对非律师而言则不显着。最后，100％的法官同意在法官的培训中应包括有关基因环境过程的信息。司法利益相关者的遗传专门知识不断增加，是朝着实现充分的法律保护以防止滥用遗传数据迈出的重要一步。