Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael
Kumho Tire Co., Ltd., et al. v. Carmichael et al.
- Court
- Supreme Court of the United States (U.S. Supreme Court)
- Decided
- 1999
- Citation
- 526 U.S. 137 (1999)
- Standard applied
- FRE 702 — Daubert gatekeeping extended to all expert testimony
What the court held
The trial judge's gatekeeping obligation under Rule 702 is not confined to “scientific” testimony; it applies to all expert testimony, including testimony resting on technical or other specialized knowledge and on experience. The Daubert factors are flexible rather than a checklist, and the trial court has latitude both in deciding how to test reliability and in deciding reliability itself. The Court upheld the exclusion of an engineering expert's visual-and-tactile tyre-failure analysis.
Why
Rule 702 makes no relevant distinction between scientific, technical, and other specialized knowledge, and it would be difficult in practice for judges to administer one that did. Because the reliability of experience-based expertise cannot always be measured by testability or error rate, the Court declined to make the Daubert factors mandatory, asking instead whether the expert employs in the courtroom the same intellectual rigour demanded in the relevant field.
“The initial question before us is whether this basic gatekeeping obligation applies only to “scientific” testimony or to all expert testimony. We, like the parties, believe that it applies to all expert testimony.”
Our reading — not the court’s words
Why this matters in practice
This is the case that makes Rule 702 bite on digital forensics, most of which is experience-based method rather than published science. It forecloses the argument that a certified examiner's practised judgment is outside Daubert because no one has published an error rate for it, and it equally forecloses the opposite argument that the absence of a published error rate is automatically fatal. The operative question it leaves behind is whether the examiner brought the same rigour to this examination that the field expects of any examination.
This paragraph is Legal Cyber Academy’s editorial assessment of the decision’s practical importance. The court said none of it. For what the court actually said, read the opinion.
Additional detail
Tags: Rule 702 · technical expertise · gatekeeping
Cited 8,811times in CourtListener’s corpus at the time this entry was compiled. Treat it as a rough measure of influence, not of correctness.
Other decisions on expert admissibility
- Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.Supreme Court of the United States · 1993The Court held that Frye's "general acceptance" test did not survive the Federal Rules of Evidence and is not a precondition to admitting scientific expert test…
- General Electric Co. v. JoinerSupreme Court of the United States · 1997A decision to admit or exclude expert testimony is reviewed for abuse of discretion, not under any more stringent standard because the ruling is outcome-determi…
- Frye v. United StatesCourt of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit · 1923Expert testimony deduced from a scientific principle is admissible only where the principle from which the deduction is made has gained general acceptance in th…
- United States v. UlbrichtCourt of Appeals for the Second Circuit · 2017The Second Circuit affirmed the exclusion of both of the defendant's proposed expert witnesses in the Silk Road prosecution because his expert notices were unti…
- Lorraine v. Markel American Insurance Co.District Court, D. Maryland · 2007Neither party's electronic exhibits could be considered because none was authenticated: e-mails were simply attached to the motions rather than supported by aff…
- Commonwealth v. NevelsSuperior Court of Pennsylvania · 2019The Superior Court affirmed the judgment of sentence, upholding the trial court's decision to admit an FBI agent's expert testimony on historical cell-site anal…
Summarised from the opinion as retrieved from CourtListener. Reference material, not legal advice. Back to the repository.