Today’s guest post is from Nick Dellefave, an up and coming Holland & Knight litigator. The Blog has rolled out a few posts on the latest edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. Nick adds to this opus with a dive into the intersection between scientific evidence, the role of trial judges
Last month we were one of the first on the web with a review of the new Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Fourth Edition. Since it was nearly 1700 pages long – literally longer than “War & Peace” – we did only the most cursory of analyses, describing differences in topics and authors
How many times have you seen a lawyer end the trial direct examination (or deposition redirect) of his/her expert by perfunctorily asking, “Do you hold all your opinions to a reasonable degree of certainty?” Then there is the obligatory “Yes.” The magic words have been uttered. All is right with the world, right?
Maybe.
If
Yesterday we did our annual best of/worst of CLE, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The Best and Worst Drug/Medical Device and Vaccine Decisions of 2025”. It was good fun for us presenters and hopefully at least mildly educational and entertaining for the audience. (If you missed it, the video replay will be available
Since it was published in 2011, the third edition of the Federal Judicial Center’s Reference Manual for Scientific Evidence has been the go-to guide for federal judges seeking to sort out scientific testimony, and a major source of non-precedential authority for both sides when arguing motions under Fed. R. Evid. 702. 2011, however, was fifteen
We have spilled a lot of blog ink on Federal Rule of Evidence 702 recently, so it was nice to see a case from our home state of California driving home the importance of following the rules when it comes to expert opinions. California has a reputation for allowing expert opinions into evidence more permissively
This “just desserts” story caught our eyes earlier this year – a hot-shot expert witness, on artificial intelligence, no less, got caught with his own hand in the AI cookie jar. As a result, his credibility was destroyed, and his testimony was excluded. The litigation leading to Kohls v. Ellison, 2025 WL 66514 (D.
Back in April, we pondered whether the new judge in the Valsartan MDL would change things for the better. In contrast to the Zantac MDL, which was established a year later and has proceeded on a very similar contamination theory, the first several years of the Valsartan MDL saw a bunch of bad rulings on
“To be clear, while an association between acetaminophen and autism has been described in many studies, a causal relationship has not been established . . . .” That is not your DDL bloggers speaking (although we did add the emphasis). It is not a drug manufacturer speaking, nor any particular doctor or researcher speaking. It