Kurtz: Did they say why, Willard, why they want to terminate my command?
Willard: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Kurtz: It’s no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Willard: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Kurtz: Are my methods unsound?
Willard: I don’t see any method at all, sir.
Kurtz: I expected someone like you. What did you expect? Are you an assassin?
Willard: I’m a soldier.
Kurtz: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Royal Society, the National Academies of Science, the Nobel Laureates have nothing on the organized plaintiffs’ bar. Consider the genius and the accomplishments of these men and women. They have discovered and built a perpetual motion machine — the asbestos litigation. They have learned how to violate the law of non-contradiction with impunity (e.g., industry is evil, and (litigation) industry is good). In the realm of the sciences, especially as applied in the courtroom, they have demonstrated the falsity of one of core beliefs: ex nihilo nihil fit. We have a lot to learn from the plaintiffs’ bar.
WOE to Corporate America
Steve Baughman Jensen is a plaintiffs’ lawyer and he justifiably gloats over his success as lead counsel in Milward v. Acuity Products Group, Inc., 639 F.3d 11 (1st Cir. 2011), cert. denied, 132 S.Ct. 1002 (2012). In a recent article for the litigation industry’s scholarly journal, Jensen touts Milward as Ariadne’s thread, which will take plaintiffs out of the mazes and traps set for them by the benighted law of expert witnesses. Steve Baughman Jensen, “Reframing the Daubert Issue in Toxic Tort Cases,” 49 Trial 46 (Feb. 2013). Jensen alleged that his client worked with solvents that contained varying amounts of benzene, which caused him to develop Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia (APL), a subtype of Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML). The district court excluded plaintiffs’ expert witnesses’ causation opinions; the First Circuit reversed. Jensen crows about his accomplished feat.
Weight of the Evidence (WOE) — Let Them Drink Ripple
Jensen, with help from philosopher of popular science Carl Cranor and toxicologist Martyn Smith persuaded the appellate court that a “weight of the evidence” (WOE) analysis necessarily involves scientific judgment. (Millward, 639 F.3d at 18), and that this “use of judgment in the weight of the evidence methodology is similar to that in differential diagnosis, which we have repeatedly found to be a reliable method of medical diagnosis.” Id. (internal citations omitted).
Is this what judicial gatekeeping of scientific expert opinion has come to? Phrenology, homeopathy, aroma therapy, and reflexology involve medical judgment, of sorts, and so they too are now reliable methodologies. Ripple makes red wine, and so does Chateau Margaux. Chateau Margaux is based upon judgment in oenology, and so is Ripple. That only one of these products will stand the test of time is irrelevant; both are the product of oenological judgment. It’s all a question of the weight you would assign the differing qualities of Ripple and a premier cru bordeaux.
Jensen never defines WOE; the closest he comes to describing WOE is to tell us that it essentially involves a delegation to expert witnesses to validate their own subjective weighing of the evidence. As in the King of Hearts, Jensen rejoices that the inmates are now running the asylum.
Too Much of Nothing
Jensen complains about a “divide and conquer” strategy by which defendants take individual studies, one at a time, pronounce them inadequate to support a judgment of causality, and then claim that the aggregate evidence fails to support causality as well. Surely sometimes that approach is misguided; yet sometimes the evidentiary display collectively represents “too much of nothing.” In some litigations, there are hundreds of studies, which despite their numbers, still fail to support causation. In General Electric v. Joiner, the Supreme Court discerned that the studies relied upon were largely irrelevant or inconclusive, and that taken alone or together, the cited studies failed to support plaintiffs’ claim of causality. In the silicone-gel breast implant litigation, the plaintiffs’ steering committee submitted banker boxes of studies and argument to the court’s appointed expert witnesses, in an attempt to manufacture causation. The committee, however, took its time and saw that the evidence taken individually or collectively did not amount to a scientific peppercorn.
Let Ignorance Rule
One of Jensen’s clever attempts to beguile the judiciary involves the transmutation of scientific inference into personal credibility. “Second-guessing an expert’s application of scientific judgment necessarily requires assessing that expert’s credibility, which is the jury’s role.” Jensen, 49 Trial at 49. Jensen attempts to reduce the “battle of experts” to a credibility contest and thus outside the purview of judicial gatekeeping. His argument conflates credibility with methodology and its application. Because the expert witness will predictably opine that he applied the methodology faithfully, Jensen asserts that the court is barred from examining the correctness of the expert witness’s self-validation.
But scientific inference is scientific because it does not depend upon the person drawing it. The inference may be weak, strong, erroneous, valid, or invalid. How we characterize the inference will turn on the data and their analysis, not on the witness’s say so.
Jensen cites comment c, to Section 28 of Restatement (Third) of Torts, as supporting his reactionary arguments for abandoning judicial gatekeeping of expert witness opinion testimony. “Juries, not judges, should determine the validity of two competing expert opinions, both of which typically fall within the realm of reasonable science.” Jensen, 49 Trial at 51 (emphasis added). The law, however, requires trial courts to assess the validity vel non of would-be testifying expert witnesses:
“[A] trial judge, acting as ‘gatekeeper’, must ‘ensure that any and all scientific testimony or evidence admitted is not only relevant, but reliable’. This requirement will sometimes ask judges to make subtle and sophisticated determinations about scientific methodology and its relation to the conclusions an expert witness seeks to offer— particularly when a case arises in an area where the science itself is tentative or uncertain, or where testimony about general risk levels in human beings or animals is offered to prove individual causation.”
General Elec. Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136, 147–49 (1997) (Breyer, J., concurring) (citations omitted). Not only is Jensen’s argument contrary to the law, the argument is based upon a cynical understanding that juries will usually have little time, experience, or aptitude for assessing validity issues, and that delegating validity issues to juries ensures that the legal system will not be able to root out pathologically weak evidence and inferences. The resolution of validity issues will be hidden behind the secretive walls of the jury room, rather than in the open sight of reasoned, published opinions, subject to public and scholarly commentary. See, e.g., In re Welding Fume Prods. Liab. Litig., No. 1:03-CV-17000, MDL 1535, 2006 WL 4507859, *33 n.78 (N.D. Ohio 2006). (“even the smartest and most attentive juror will be challenged by the parties’ assertions of observation bias, selection bias, information bias, sampling error, confounding, low statistical power, insufficient odds ratio, excessive confidence intervals, miscalculation, design flaws, and other alleged shortcomings of all of the epidemiological studies.”)
Martyn Smith
Jensen extols the achievements of Dr. Martyn Smith, his expert witness who was excluded by the trial court in Milward. A disinterested reader might mistakenly think that Smith was among the leading benzene researchers in the world, but a little Googling would turn up that Milward was not his first litigation citation. Smith has been pulled over for outrunning his expert-witness headlights in several other litigations, including:
- Jacoby v. Rite Aid, Phila. Cty. Ct. Common Pleas (Order of April 27, 2012; Opinion of April 12, 2012) (excluding Smith as an expert witness on the toxicity of Fix-o-Dent)
- In re Baycol Prods. Litig., 495 F. Supp.2d 977 (D. Minn. 2007)
- In re Rezulin Prods. Liab. Litig., MDL 1348, 441 F.Supp.2d 567 (S.D.N.Y. 2006)(“silent injury”)
None of these other cases involved benzene, but they all involved speculative opinions.
The Milward Symposium
Jensen took another victory lap at the Milward Symposium Organized By Plaintiffs’ Counsel and Witnesses. The presentations from this symposium have now appeared in print: Wake Forest Publishes the Litigation Industry’s Views on Milward. See Steve Baughman Jensen, “Sometimes Doubt Doesn’t Sell: A Plaintiffs’ Lawyer’s Perspective on Milward v. Acuity Products,” 3 Wake Forest J. L. & Policy 177 (2013). Jensen’s contribution was mostly a shrill ad hominem against corporations, as well as their lawyers and scientists who complicitly support an alleged campaign to manufacture doubt.
Perhaps someday the law journal’s faculty advisors and editors will feel some embarrassment over the lack of balance and scholarship in Jensen’s contribution to the symposium. Corporations are bad; get it? They manufacture doubt about the litigation industry’s enterprise. Don’t pay attention to massive litigation fraud, such as faux silicosis, faux asbestosis, faux fen-phen heart disease, faux product identification, etc. See Larry Husten, “79-Year-Old Cardiologist Sentenced To 6 Years In Prison For Fen-Phen Fraud,” Forbes (Mar. 27, 2013). Forget that ATLA/AAJ is one of the most powerful rent-seeking lobbies in the United States. Litigants have a constitutional right to extrapolate as they please. If a substance causes one disease at a very high dose, then it causes every ailment known to mankind at moderate or low doses. Specific disease entails general disease, etc. What you balk? You must be a doubt mongerer.
Jensen assures us that many scientists support and agree with Martyn Smith, both in his methodology and in his conclusions. Jensen’s articles are sketchy on details, and of course, the devil is in the details. See Amended Amicus Curiae Brief of the Council for Education and Research on Toxins et al., In Support of Appellants, in Milward. This Council seems to fly under the internet radar, but I suspect that its membership and that of the Center for Progressive Reform overlaps somewhat.
Jensen’s article is just one of several published in the Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy. Let’s hope the remaining articles have more substance to them.
