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Full-Text Articles in Law
Embracing Deference, Edward K. Cheng, Elodie O. Currier, Payton B. Hampton
Embracing Deference, Edward K. Cheng, Elodie O. Currier, Payton B. Hampton
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
A fundamental conceptual problem has long dogged discussions about scientific and other expert evidence in the courtroom. In American law, the problem was most famously posed by Judge Learned Hand, who asked: "[H]ow can the jury judge between two statements each founded upon an experience confessedly foreign in kind to their own? It is just because they are incompetent for such a task that the expert is necessary at all." This puzzle, sometimes known as the "expert paradox," is quite general. It applies not only to the jury as factfinder, but also to the judge as gate- keeper under the …
The Consensus Rule: A New Approach To Scientific Evidence, Edward K. Cheng
The Consensus Rule: A New Approach To Scientific Evidence, Edward K. Cheng
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Founded on good intentions but unrealistic expectations, the dominant Daubert framework for handling expert and scientific evidence should be scrapped. Daubert asks judges and jurors to make substantively expert determinations, a task they are epistemically incompetent to perform as laypersons. As an alternative, this Article proposes a new framework for handling expert evidence. It draws from the social and philosophical literature on expertise and begins with a basic question: How can laypersons make intelligent decisions about expert topics? From there, it builds its evidentiary approach, which ultimately results in an inference rule focused on expert communities. Specifically, when dealing with …