Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Supreme Court of the United States · Decided June 28, 1993 · 1993
Identifier: 509 U.S. 579
Access and status
Cost
Free
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Status
Current
Current as at the verification date below. Standards and tools both move — confirm at source before you rely on it.
What it is
The decision holding that the Federal Rules of Evidence, not Frye's general-acceptance test, govern expert scientific testimony, and that the trial judge acts as a gatekeeper for reliability and fit. It offers a non-exclusive list of considerations: testability, peer review and publication, known or potential error rate, standards controlling the technique's operation, and general acceptance.
Who it is for, and when
Read it for the vocabulary that every reliability argument still uses, and because the five considerations map almost directly onto the questions a digital forensic method has to answer — has it been tested, what is its error rate, is there a controlling standard. Examiners should treat the list as a checklist of what their methods section needs to be able to answer. Lawyers should read it with the 2023 text of Rule 702 in hand, since the rule now states the burden the opinion did not.
What it does not cover
It predates every modern digital forensic method and mentions none of them, and its factors are not a test to be applied mechanically. It binds federal courts; a number of states still apply Frye or their own variants.
Go to the source
Open at law.cornell.edu (opens in a new tab)https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/509/579
Details
- Type
- Standard or guidance
- Written for
- Lawyers and courtsWorking examinerLawyers and courts, Working examiner
- Publisher
- Supreme Court of the United States
- Version verified
- Decided June 28, 1993
- Year
- 1993
- Identifier
- 509 U.S. 579
- Topics
- expert-testimony, legal-admissibility, validation, us-federal
- Checked at source
- Standards are revised. Confirm the current revision with the publisher before citing this.
Related entries
NIST's scientific foundation review of digital forensics, examining the peer-reviewed literature, academic material and practitioner guidance behind digital investigation techniques. It concludes the techniques rest on established computer science methods and are reliable when properly applied, while naming specific limits.
The federal admissibility rule for expert testimony. The 2023 amendment moved the burden into the rule text — the proponent must demonstrate to the court that it is more likely than not that each of the four requirements is met — and rewrote subsection (d) so that the opinion must reflect a reliable application of the principles and methods to the facts of the case.
An illustration of sufficient authentication: "Evidence describing a process or system and showing that it produces an accurate result." It is the route by which the output of software, an acquisition tool, or an automated system is authenticated through testimony about the tool rather than about the document.
The decision extending the Daubert gatekeeping obligation to all expert testimony under Rule 702, including technical and other specialized knowledge, and holding that the Daubert considerations are flexible rather than mandatory, with the trial court's choices reviewed for abuse of discretion.
The judiciary's own reference work on scientific and technical evidence, produced jointly by the Federal Judicial Center and the National Academies, made up of reference guides written by scientists and judges on individual fields plus chapters on the judge's gatekeeping role. The fourth edition rewrites every guide carried over from 2011 and adds new guides on eyewitness identification, computer science, and artificial intelligence.