Recall I’m a lawyer fighting a fairly lonely battle for sound science in the courtroom. So let me tell you; abandoning Popper and falsification (i.e. rejecting Daubert v. Merrell Dow) and going to a subjective “more likely than not belief” standard is nothing but a recipe for handing billions more over to the already super rich trial lawyers (several of whom are starting to report to prison, along with their experts, for the perjury, bribing of judges, etc that went on back in the bad old days).
Alas. The claim that “science can’t prove anything for sure so let’s allow “experts” to testify about what they believe and have the jurors sort it out” is starting to surface in cases I work on. In those cases, self-proclaimed experts charging $500/hr or more per hour to testify to their beliefs, which allegedly arise out of the penumbras of their expertise, and which correlate precisely with the position of the side that hired them, are already cashing in. The law will not appreciate the niceties of the argument here and it won’t be long before we have PhDs testifying that MRI machines damage ESP powers … again. (My personal favorite was an expert in New York who was allowed to testify that C6H6 made synthetically was toxic at the one molecule dose level but that C6H6 generated by the body was not because “natural” benzene had a “life resonance electron level” which kept its “electron cloud in a harmless state”. He believed it and believed it strongly so he got to testify to it because he is an MD/PhD.)
So just say “Hell NO!” to “subjective degrees of belief”, or anything similar, as the standard definition of science in tort cases …. and that’s what it will be if “science” says that’s what real science is. Unless you’re a trial lawyer who files his cases in a poor rural area it will cost you beaucoup otherwise. I get the distinction but most won’t and the scoundrels will have a field day.
Let’s not and say we did.
Recall I’m a lawyer fighting a fairly lonely battle for sound science in the courtroom. So let me tell you; abandoning Popper and falsification (i.e. rejecting Daubert v. Merrell Dow) and going to a subjective “more likely than not belief” standard is nothing but a recipe for handing billions more over to the already super rich trial lawyers (several of whom are starting to report to prison, along with their experts, for the perjury, bribing of judges, etc that went on back in the bad old days).
Alas. The claim that “science can’t prove anything for sure so let’s allow “experts” to testify about what they believe and have the jurors sort it out” is starting to surface in cases I work on. In those cases, self-proclaimed experts charging $500/hr or more per hour to testify to their beliefs, which allegedly arise out of the penumbras of their expertise, and which correlate precisely with the position of the side that hired them, are already cashing in. The law will not appreciate the niceties of the argument here and it won’t be long before we have PhDs testifying that MRI machines damage ESP powers … again. (My personal favorite was an expert in New York who was allowed to testify that C6H6 made synthetically was toxic at the one molecule dose level but that C6H6 generated by the body was not because “natural” benzene had a “life resonance electron level” which kept its “electron cloud in a harmless state”. He believed it and believed it strongly so he got to testify to it because he is an MD/PhD.)
So just say “Hell NO!” to “subjective degrees of belief”, or anything similar, as the standard definition of science in tort cases …. and that’s what it will be if “science” says that’s what real science is. Unless you’re a trial lawyer who files his cases in a poor rural area it will cost you beaucoup otherwise. I get the distinction but most won’t and the scoundrels will have a field day.