Recently, there has been a trend in both civil litigation and regulatory law to circumvent the scientific community's collective judgment on the quality of individual studies with an adversarial process of evaluating scientific quality using interest groups. The Supreme Court's Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc opinion and two recent "good science" laws passed by Congress adopt an adve...

It is important for forensic experts to understand how clinical practice guidelines may enter the courtroom, what role they may play in a trial, and how they relate to expert testimony. Guidelines enter the record in several different ways and in several types of cases, typically with the assistance of an expert witness. A common vehicle for their introduction is the learned-treatise exception ...

This article shows that, as to proffers of asserted expert testimony, civil defendants win their Daubert reliability challenges to plaintiffs’ proffers most of the time, and that criminal defendants virtually always lose their reliability challenges to government proffers. And, when civil defendants’ proffers are challenged by plaintiffs, those defendants usually win, but when criminal defendan...

The discussion of "error" has gained momentum in forensic science in the wake of the Daubert guidelines and has intensified with the National Academy of Sciences' Report. Error has many different meanings, and too often, forensic practitioners themselves as well as the courts misunderstand scientific error and statistical error rates, often confusing them with practitioner error (or mistakes). ...

The adversarial structure of the American judicial system encourages critical reviews and challenges of forensic evidence. As a result, the discriminatory power of friction ridge skin impression evidence has been a prime target of debate among critics of the latent print discipline for years, the primary argument being friction ridge skin examination is neither scientif ically reliable nor lega...

The Daubert process used in the admissibility of evidence contains major guidelines applied in assessing forensic procedures, two of which are testing and error rates. The Digital Forensic Science (DFS) community is growing and the error rates for the forensic tools need to be continuously re-evaluated as the technology changes. This becomes more difficult in the case of mobile phone forensics,...

“Judges Become Leery of Expert Witnesses,” ran a headline in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago; they are “Skeptical of Unproven Science”—the “Testimony of Dilettantes” (Schmitt 1997). Intrigued, I began to struggle through thickets of details of exploding tires, allegedly poisonous perfumes, leaking and bursting breast implants, contaminated insulating oil, etc., etc., and through l...