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Explaining the Tension between the Supreme Court's Embrace of Validity as the Touchstone of Admissibility of Expert Testimony and Lower Courts' (Seeming) Rejection of Same

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Michael J. Saks
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Abstract

By lopsided majorities, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of cases, persistently commanded the lower courts to condition the admission of proffered expert testimony on the demonstrated validity of the proponents’ claims of expertise. In at least one broad area–the so-called forensic sciences–the courts below have largely evaded the Supreme Court's holdings. This paper aims to try to explain this massive defiance by the lower courts in terms of social epistemology.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , October 2008 , pp. 329 - 342
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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