For those of us who litigate health effects claims, either as pursuers or defenders, the pathology of science is often as important and interesting as pristine methodology. Identifying the pathological epistemology (patho-epistemology) of our adversaries’ claims, in the facts and data relied upon, and the inferences drawn at every step in reasoning to a conclusion,…

Over a decade ago, I wrote a post about the American Public Health Association (APHA) and its position papers opposing the Daubert regime of gatekeeping the validity of expert witness opinion testimony. I am updating the post, with some modifications, because the links to the APHA documents are broken. It appears that the APHA now…

Given the outsized role that IARC can sometimes take in litigation and regulation, lawyers and judges should pay some attention to, and give some critical thought about, how the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence addresses IARC’s classifications and evaluations of putative carcinogens.
The Reference Manual is published by the Federal Judicial Center and the National…

The most recent edition of the Reference Manual on epidemiology distinguishes more carefully between Bayesian and frequentist approaches to statistical analyses than did its previous iterations. In past editions, the authors conflated confidence and credible intervals, an error that is studiously avoided in the text of the chapter on epidemiology, in the fourth edition.[1]…

The Second and Third Editions of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence contained a chapter, “How Science Works,” by Professor David Goodstein. This chapter ambitiously set out to cover philosophy and sociology of science to help orient judges as strangers in a strange land. Goodstein’s chapter had been a useful introduction to scientific methodology, and…

By ignoring Milward’s expert witnesses’ omissions from, and abridgements of, WOE and IBE, the appellate court blinded itself to these witnesses’ distortions of scientific method. The need for judgment, which the Milward court was keen to honor, does not mean that there are not aberrant or deviant judgments, or deviations from the standard of scientific…

In the district court, Judge George O’Toole conducted a pre-trial hearing over four days, and heard testimony from Smith and Cranor, as well as from defense expert witnesses. Judge O’Toole’s published opinion carefully and accurately stated the facts, the applicable law, and presented a well-reasoned judgment as to why Smith’s opinion was not admissible under…