Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), is a United States Supreme Court case determining the standard for admitting expert testimony in federal courts. In Daubert, the Court held that the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence implicitly overturned the Frye standard; the standard that the Court articulated is referred to as the Daubert standard.
Facts
Jason Daubert and Eric Schuller were born with serious birth defects. They and their parents sued Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc., a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company, in a California District Court, claiming that the drug Bendectin had caused the birth defects. Merrell Dow moved the case to federal court, and then moved for summary judgment because their expert submitted documents showing that no published scientific study demonstrated a link between Bendectin and birth defects in humans. Daubert and Schuller submitted expert evidence of their own that suggested that Bendectin could cause birth defects. Daubert and Schuller's evidence, however, was based on in vitro and in vivo animal studies, pharmacological studies, and reanalysis of other published studies, and these methodologies had not yet gained acceptance within the general scientific community.
The district court granted summary judgment for Merrell Dow, and Daubert and Schuller appealed to the Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit found the district court correctly granted summary judgment because the plaintiffs' proffered evidence had not yet been accepted as a reliable technique by scientists who had had an opportunity to scrutinize and verify the methods used by those scientists. Furthermore, the Ninth Circuit was skeptical of the fact that the plaintiffs' evidence appeared to be generated in preparation for litigation. Without their proffered evidence, the Ninth Circuit doubted that the plaintiffs could prove at a trial that the Bendectin had caused their birth defects.
Majority opinion
Prior law
In a 1923 case, Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923), the D.C. Circuit held that evidence could be admitted in court only if "the thing from which the deduction is made" is "sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs." Frye dealt with a systolic blood pressure deception test, a "crude precursor" to the polygraph. In 1923, this blood pressure test was not widely accepted among scientists, and so the Frye court ruled it could not be used in court. Over the years, scholars disputed the proper scope and application of the Frye test.
The plaintiffs successfully argued that after Congress adopted the Federal Rules of Evidence in 1975, Frye was no longer the governing standard for admitting scientific evidence in trials held in federal court. The Supreme Court agreed and had already ruled that where common law rules conflicted with provisions of the Rules, the enactment of the Rules had the effect of supplanting the common law. Frye had remained part of the federal common law of evidence because it was decided almost 50 years before the Rules were enacted, but the text of the Rules did not suggest a congressional intent to keep the Frye rule, so the Court reasoned that Frye was no longer the rule.
Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence provides (in part):
If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise...
The text of Rule 702 did not make admissibility of expert testimony depend on general acceptance, and there was no evidence that Congress intended to incorporate a general acceptance standard into Rule 702. "Given the Rules' permissive backdrop and their inclusion of a specific rule on expert testimony that does not mention 'general acceptance,' the assertion that the Rules somehow assimilated Frye is unconvincing. Frye made 'general acceptance' the exclusive test for admitting expert testimony. That austere standard, absent from, and incompatible with, the Federal Rules of Evidence, should not be applied in federal trials."