Law prof comments on expert testimony statements

An article in the July/August issue of Arizona Attorney magazine, “New Standard for Scientific and Expert Testimony,” included comments from Regents’ Professor Michael Saks of the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law.

The article, by editor Tim Eigo, reported on a new standard in Arizona that controls the admissibility of expert opinion testimony in state courts. Arizona has moved from using the Frye test, named for a 1923 federal circuit court case regarding polygraph evidence, to the Daubert standard, which resulted from a series of three cases in the 1990s when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Frye test. The federal courts and more than half of the states use the Daubert standard.

Eigo reported that Daubert is most often touted as a tool to limit the admission of testimony that sometimes is viewed as “junk science.”

With the Daubert standard in use, Saks said he expects more successful challenges by defendants of plaintiff evidence.

“Judges have become more aggressive in using Daubert to exclude tort plaintiffs’ evidence,” he said, noting that can lead to a serious problem in which the defendant may be in the only one in a position to research whether its product is harmful or not.