November 28, 2007

Daubert strikes again, as a Texas federal judge throws out a test video relied on by the plaintiffs' expert in a case against Ford. Of the video, produced by an accident reconstructionist and styled as a "sanity test" of rear sensors intended to prevent collisions with children while backing up, the judge commented (PDF, via Hutchinson): “It wasn’t at all the quality experiment that I would expect” and “to say I wasn’t impressed is an understatement”; it “is, in my estimate, an embarrassment to the scientific community.” A Fifth Circuit panel has upheld the exclusion.