A Proclamation from the Task Force on Statistical Significance
The American Statistical Association (ASA) has finally spoken up about statistical significance testing.[1] Sort of. Back in February of this year, I wrote about the simmering controversy over...
View ArticleSlide Rule 702
Note: A “fatal error,” caused by an old theme has disrupted the layout of my website. I am working on it The opposition to Daubert’s regime of gatekeeping by the lawsuit industry has been fierce. From...
View ArticlePeople Get Ready – There’s a Reference Manual a Comin’
Science is the key … Back in February, I wrote about a National Academies’ workshop that featured some outstanding members of the scientific and statistical world, and which gave participants to...
View ArticleEpistemic Virtue – Dropping the Dime on Tenpenny
When Marjorie Taylor Greene came under fire for propagating lies about Jewish space lasers and other fantastical conspiracy theories, she did not apologize. Rather she turned the opproprium into a...
View ArticleThe History of Litigations – Silica Litigation
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is...
View ArticleAvoiding Apportionment in Favor of Joint & Several Liabilities
Back in 2008, Professor Michael Green wrote an interesting paper on apportionment in asbestos litigation. The paper sets out an argument that apportionment is a 20th century reform of American tort...
View ArticleFinding Big Blue
The Washington Supreme Court recently upheld an $81.5 million verdict, against GPC and NAPA, in an asbestos peritoneal mesothelioma case. The award included $30 million for loss of consortium. Coogan...
View ArticleThe Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Mangling of Causal Apportionment for...
After the advent of hyperstrict products liability law in the 1960s, Pennsylvania law fell into the trap of treating liability as joint and several, based upon pro rata, or per capita contribution. The...
View ArticleCrying Wolf Projected
Over the years ago, I have written about David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, two academic historians, who testify a lot for the lawsuit industry, mostly in asbestos cases, but also in cases involving...
View ArticleExpert Witness Reports Are Not Admissible
The tradition of antic proposals to change the law of evidence is old and venerable in the common law. In the early 19th century, Jeremy Bentham deviled the English bench and bar with sweeping...
View ArticleRule 702 is Liberal, Not Libertine; Epistemic, Not Mechanical
One common criticism of expert witness gatekeeping after the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision has been that the decision contravenes the claimed “liberal thrust” of the Federal Rules of Evidence. The...
View ArticleState-of-the-Art Legal Defenses and Shifty Paradigms
The essence of a failure-to-warn claim is that (1) a manufacturer knows, or should know, about a harmful aspect of its product, (2) which knowledge is not appreciated by customers, (3) the manufacturer...
View ArticleReference Manual on Scientific Evidence – 3rd Edition is Past Its Expiry
INTRODUCTION The new, third edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence was released to the public in September 2011, as a joint production of the National Academies of Science, and the...
View ArticleWhen the American Medical Association Woke Up
“You are more than entitled not to know what the word ‘performative’ means. It is a new word and an ugly word, and perhaps it does not mean anything very much. But at any rate there is one thing in its...
View ArticleConfounded by Confounding in Unexpected Places
In assessing an association for causality, the starting point is “an association between two variables, perfectly clear-cut and beyond what we would care to attribute to the play of chance.”[1] In...
View ArticleOf Significance, Error, Confidence & Confusion – In Law & Statistics
A version of this post appeared previously on Professor Deborah Mayo’s blog, Error Statistics Philosophy. The post was invited as a comment on Professor Mayo’s article in Conservation Biology, which is...
View ArticleHindsight Bias – In Science & in the Law
In the early 1970s, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman raised the awareness of hindsight bias as a pervasive phenomenon in all human judgment.[1] Although these insights seemed eponymously obvious in...
View ArticleThe American Tort Law Museum
Last year, Professor Christopher J. Robinette wrote a blog post about the American Tort Law Museum. I had not heard of it, but I was curious. I have stopped by the Museum’s website on a few occasions...
View ArticleImproper Reliance upon Regulatory Risk Assessments in Civil Litigation
Risk assessments would seemingly be about assessing risks, but they are not. The Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence defines “risk” as “[a] probability that an event will occur (e.g., that an...
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Reference Manual – Desiderata for 4th Edition – Part III – Differential Etiology
Admittedly, I am playing the role of the curmudgeon here by pointing out errors or confusions in the third edition of the Reference Manual. To be sure, there are many helpful and insightful...
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