Doubting Daubert
19 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2005
Abstract
In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the Supreme Court announced that it was liberalizing the rules on admissibility of expert scientific evidence by rejecting a requirement that such evidence be generally accepted in the scientific community. "Daubert" has had just the opposite effect from the one the Court said it intended: it has narrowed rather than enlarged the range of expert evidence admitted by courts, and it has ushered in a whole suit of unscientific legal rulings in the process. Proposals to extend "Daubert" to the administrative setting should be rejected, and the courts should pull back from "Daubert" itself.
Keywords: Daubert, torts, environmental law, administrative law, rules of evidence, expert evidence, scientific method, junk science
JEL Classification: D82, K33, K14
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation