For the past decade, federal judges have been obligated to serve as gatekeepers and keep scientifically unreliable and irrelevant expert testimony out of the courtroom. The exacting evidentiary standards set forth in the landmark Daubert decision have had a significant impact on numerous areas of legal dispute. Toxic tort litigation, in particular, has been transformed by the standards. This Ar...

Federal Rule of Evidence 704(b) prevents psychiatrists and other expert witnesses in federal criminal trials from testifying as to whether a defendant did or did not have a mental state or condition comprising either an element of the crime or an element of the defense. This paper describes the origins of the Rule and its judicial development. The Rule is an exception to a 20th century trend th...

Objective: Expert witness testimony is crucial for juror decision making. The goals of this study were to examine the trends in malpractice litigation in plastic surgery and to examine the characteristics of expert witnesses in litigation. Methods: The Westlaw legal database was queried for jury verdict and settlement reports related to plastic surgery cases from 2009 to 2015. Cases were examin...

Recent Supreme Court decisions emphasize the need to regulate the admissibility of expert testimony by means of standards that require opinions to go beyond ipse dixit--that is, that are based on more than the fact that the expert said it. The authors discuss subtextual themes underlying this issue and suggest approaches to attaining expert clinical opinions that reduce the likelihood of being ...

Professor Slobogin’s new book, Proving the Unprovable, is the most provocative evidence text that I have read in years. In the book, he argues in favor of a more relaxed standard for admitting psychologists’ and psychiatrists’ testimony about a person’s prior mental state. He contends that a person’s earlier mental state is essentially unprovable and that it is impossible to gauge the validity ...

There is growing attention to complex scientific questions in legal cases and the need for scientific expert testimony in these cases, including environmental health issues. This commentary addresses some problems common in expert witness work and recommends ways in which the legal system, the scientist, and our educational institutions can enhance the roles of experts. These recommendations ma...

3. I have served as an expert in multiple cases about adware and spyware. I prepared written and oral testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs in Wells Fargo & Co. and Quicken Loans, Inc. v. WhenU.com, Inc., 293 F.Supp.2d 734, E.D.Mich. 2003. I gave a deposition and was prepared to testify as an expert on behalf of the plaintiffs in Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC, et al. v. the Gator ...

It has been suggested that changes in, and more vigorous enforcement of, professional ethical codes might lead to significant improvements in the quality of expert testimony by mental health professionals. The author examines the arguments for and against this thesis, and concludes that lack of consensus on controversial issues is likely to impede implementation and enforcement of meaningful et...

The aim of this article is to explore the boundaries of psychiatric testimony in criminal cases. In a series of vignettes, the author describes applications of psychiatric testimony in nontraditional areas. These are criminal cases in which the defendant-who was not mentally ill-acted in response to a situation that would tend to trigger violence in many persons: protection of self or others. I...