Science and the Supreme Court

WARNING: The following contains broad interpretations of court holdings.

Recently we read a series of cases for my Torts class and I've developed a real issue with court involvement in certain professional communities. The first case involved a medical malpractice situations where a doctor failed to diagnose a lady with glaucoma. This was back in the 1950s and glaucoma testing was not general practice for doctors unless the patient was over 40 years old (this patient was 30). The patient lost part of her eye sight and she won money damages from the doctor. The court decided that the doctor was negligent for failing to perform the simple glaucoma test and thus not diagnosing glaucoma. The court determined that the doctor should have set a new standard for his profession and have conducted the test. By failing to do so, the doctor was negligent. The broad interpretation of this case says that a court could impose a new standard or duty of care on any profession at any time if the court decides that the profession is not setting proper standards. This is ridiculous. The court is not a board of medical professionals, and if the medical profession set a standard, that should be the duty of care by which a doctor is evaluated, not some arbitrary court standard.

Case #2 involves scientific expert testimony and evidence. In this case the plaintiff had an expert "cook the books" on some scientific data to get the results they wanted to see. However, the argument before the court was over differing scientific methods. While I agree that in this case the expert and scientific evidence was bogus, the overall holding of the court was again ridiculous. The court established a new standard by which the admission of expert and scientific testimony would be judged. If the experts disagreed as to the proper "scientific method" or interpretation of data the judge would first looked to the peer reviewed data (probably not a bad idea but very limiting on some subjects) and then decide for himself or herself which "expert" used the proper methodology or interpretation methods. Whichever the judge felt met the standards better that would be the evidence that would be admissible. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!?!?! The reasoning of the court was (I kid you not) that the judge is a highly educated individual and should be able to figure these things out. While the jury, being not so educated, may get confused by the conflicting experts. Furthermore, we're talking situations in which groups of scientific experts differ among themselves about the proper scientific method and interpretation. How in the world is the judge, who is not scientifically trained, supposed to discern which party "got it right." Basically the judge is saying "I think scientifically. I know because I'm a lawyer."

The final case (I know you're sick of my ranting) discussed the probability factor of a timely diagnosis of a cancer patient. In this situation the standard for deciding between two survival statistics. Long story short... the belief was that statistics can't be manipulated and that recovery (money given to the plaintiff) should be determined based on the statistical average of survival or increased life expectancy for early diagnosis. So the question of course is: which survival statistics? Do you look at all cancers? In this case all, lung cancers? Or that specific type of lung cancer? Or men with that specific lung cancer? Or men in the patient's age group with that specific type of cancer? What statistic do you look at because the broad range of choices yields too many options for recovery of money damages to the plaintiff?

So, for Shyla's analysis... In my humble (yet correct opinion since 7 weeks of law school have allowed me to form such high ranking opinions) the courts have no role in validating scientific or expert testimony. While I agree that there should be standards of care within professions which allow people to recover for damages caused by negligent behavior, it is beyond me how the court feels they have the right to decide what these standards are. Furthermore, I would like to point out that the judicial system is completely self regulating. Last time I checked the medical community was not telling the court what the proper civil procedure was for deciding if a case has federal jurisdiction.