The 70-year-old Frye standards of "general acceptance" were replaced by the Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert criteria of the scientific method, which established the standards for admissibility of evidence in Federal Court. The four Daubert criteria were: 1- Hypothesis testing, 2- Estimates of error rates, 3- Peer reviewed publication and 4- General acceptance (Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical...

Daubert is one of the more important decisions of the twentieth century because it changed fundamentally the relationship between law and science. Prior to Daubert, the law deferred to the scientific community on the question whether answers that scientists provide are sufficiently grounded in theory and practice to be trusted and acted upon by courts. After Daubert, judges are charged independ...

The authors discussed to what degree testimony from social science and mental health experts (psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, therapists, others) meets admissibility requirements expressed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Daubert (1993), Joiner (General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 1997) and the recent Kumho (1999) decision. They reviewed data on Daubert/Kumho indicia of reliability using ...

Early in the 1990s, two separate and equally momentous events occurred, both of which would change the connection between forensic psychiatry and the law. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993) and evidence-based practice (EBP) both emerged as elements that would stimulate assessment of the best available scientific evidence to be employed in reaching judicial decisions. Both empha...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert modernized the long-standing Frye precedent and requires courts to make scientific judgments. Courts, however, are not well-equipped to parse scientific arguments and the Daubert criteria offer only a rudimentary framework for decision-making. To illustrate the problems, as well as possible ways for courts to deal with scientific evidence, the paper ...