Daubert vs Dow Pharmaceuticals

Thomas Long

BLAW 310-9

14 April 2015

Daubert v Merrell Dow

Not many people will believe or value the opinion of a mechanic when it is concerning the ebbs and flows of a company’s stock price. This is because the mechanic would not be believed to be an expert in the world finance and economics.  The same general concept applies in court when accepting evidence in a testimony during a trial.  This case is concerning the requirements for expert testimony to be admissible as evidence during the trial, however there are varying opinions on what qualifies as admissible evidence especially when pertaining to science.

In 1993, Jason Daubert and Eric Schuller, who had been born with birth defects, and their parents filed suit against Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc. blaming them for their defects. The drug Bendectin, which was taken by the mothers during pregnancy, was produced by Merrell Dow and they believed it to be the cause of Daubert and Schuller’s birth defects. The problems in court arose when evidence provided by Daubert and Schuller was not viable because their method of gathering the information was based on practices that ‘had not gained acceptance within the general scientific community.” A series of appeals began the controversial case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceutical Inc. which would change the methods of accepting scientific and other forms of evidence during a trial.

The legal environment surrounding this case is one concerning what rule should be applied to determine whether certain scientific evidence is admissible to court or not. There are several rules that govern this. One rule was a result of a previous ruling in Frye v. United States, 54 App.D.C. 46, 47, 293 F. 1013, 1014 (1923), where the court stated that expert testimony based on scientific technique is inadmissible in court unless the technique has been generally accepted in the scientific community. What this court statement implies is that the scientific technique in question...