Lewis & Clark Law Review
First Page
59
Abstract
Attorneys use expert testimony to advance legal positions in courtrooms. Because expert testimony can have tremendous influence over judges and juries, it is admitted only if it meets specific admissibility standards, i.e., Frye and Daubert. These standards provide different admissibility criteria, have been adopted by distinct sets of jurisdictions, and, we argue, are of questionable validity. These standards are attempts to ensure that only knowledge is admissible and are, then, essentially an epistemic matter. Science serves as a proxy for knowledge because science is the epistemic process that has been successful at generating knowledge. However, both epistemology and the philosophy of science are complex and unsettled. This review seeks (1) to enumerate the strengths and weaknesses of existing admissibility standards, (2) to propose an improved multidimensional set of admissibility criteria that better capture the manifold ways of evaluating science, and (3) employ these criteria to evaluate a set of claims in psychiatry known as the child sexual abuse accommodation syndrome to demonstrate the implementation of these new admissibility criteria.
Recommended Citation
William O'Donohue & Sneha Gupta,
Admitting Science: Problems with Current Admissibility Standards,
1
Lewis & Clark L. Rev.
59
(2025).
Available at:
https://lawcommons.lclark.edu/lclr/vol29/iss1/3