Scientific evidence plays a crucial role in virtually all mass torts cases (whether prescription drugs, environmental exposures, or consumer products), and so, when the National Research Council and the Federal Judicial Center published the Third Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, lawyers took note. Apart from Supreme Court opinions — which these days often raise more questions than they answer, which is partly why Daubert is still the leading case twenty years later — the Manual is likely the primary reference federal judges use to guide them in deciding what scientific evidence they allow into a jury trial.
Scientific evidence is one of those rare areas of law upon which every lawyer agrees: we are all certain that everyone else is wrong.
Defense lawyers think judges too easily allow in “junk science” from plaintiffs, citing the silicon breast implant litigation, which resulted in over $3 billion in settlements and compensation for autoimmune injuries that most scientists now agree weren’t caused by the implants. Plaintiff’s lawyers, in turn, think the silicon implant case is the exception that proves the rule, and that courts these days more frequently use Daubert and Frye to destroy plaintiffs’ cases by wrongly excluding from trial valid scientific and medical testimony (here’s an example involving vinyl chloride and cancer, and another involving Tylenol and liver damage, and don’t forget Kumho Tire’s indefensible exclusion of an eminently qualified tire tread separation expert), while allowing defendants to bring in all kinds of unscientific nonsense (like the natural forces nonsense in shoulder dystocia lawsuits that’s allowed everywhere except New York).
(In the criminal context, prosecutors complain about the “CSI Effect,” the claim that jurors today expect forensic evidence in every case, while criminal defense lawyers counter that the forensic evidence offered is often garbage and speculation from people with a diploma mill degree.)
As far as I can tell, mostly defense lawyers took note of the Reference Manual publicly, and they took a starkly negative view of it. Nathan Schachtman says “there is a good deal of equivocation between encouraging judges to look at scientific validity, and discouraging them from any meaningful analysis by emphasizing inaccurate proxies for validity, such as conflicts of interest.” David Oliver has been on the warpath, claiming “the fix is in” and most recently criticizing the chapter, “How Science Works,” written by David Goodstein, Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at CalTech.
Oliver complains:
Avoiding any pretense of humility the Reference Manual dismisses as woefully naive and inadequate those claims about the essence of the scientific endeavor that were ingrained in us in school. … Unsurprisingly the Reference Manual, operating on the view that objectivity is an illusion, that you can never prove anything is false and that you can never prove anything is true (“the apparent asymmetry between falsification and verification that lies at the heart of Popper’s theory thus vanishes”) and thus without any track to follow, quickly careens into post-modernism. … So all the great thinkers were wrong. Objectivity is out. Testability is out. Keeping an open mind is out. Skepticism is right out. The appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy but fundamental to science.
I think Oliver has misunderstood the purpose of the chapter.
Continue Reading The Difference Between Scientific Evidence And The Scientific Method