Talk:Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Expertise. I'm rewriting the article to meet the general style requirements of other Wikipedia articles on Supreme Court decisions and to add an expert's guidance here. In the process of editing, I might also move the content of the Daubert standard article into this one, or I might move the content of this article to that one. I haven't thought it through yet. ---Axios023 05:45, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, all right, as long as that expert guidance has been reliably tested, peer reviewed, has a known error rate, and is generally accepted by the relevant community. 24.5.193.228 (talk) 14:19, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Title needs to be fixed
The correct caption for this case, as reported in the United States Reports, is: Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. --- Will someone please change the title of this article to reflect the appropriate caption? Thank you. Supervox2113 (talk) 22:23, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

--- The rules for citing legal cases are many and varied. (Not Wikipedia rules. I mean rules promulgated by courts and the citing style books of various law journals.) The style of this case is actually very long, since Daubert's name is followed by a long string of references to wife, guardian, etc. The general rational in naming cases in citations is that it be readily identifiable and allow it to be shortened in any number of ways. The article title cannot but refer to this particular well-known case, and while it is indeed legally significant that the respondent is a corporation, it adds nothing to a reader's ability to identify the subject. My own opinion is that when a legal case is the subject of a WP article, it should not be so long as to make the title unwieldly. I agree that adding the ",Inc." would not overburden the title, but I don't think the conventions of legal case naming demand adding it, either. So, no real argument. I just won't be the one to do it. Jeltz the Poet (talk) 21:47, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

some stuff
I'm cleaning up the Daubert page and I don't think an in-depth brief of the case belongs there. However, I'm not in a position to integrate the material into this article right now. When someone gets around to it, here it is:

In the Daubert case, Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc, a subsidiary of Dow Chemical Company, was sued by a mother whose baby Jason Daubert had a congenital disorder. He was born in 1974 having only two fingers on his right hand and without a lower bone on his right arm. His mother had taken Bendectin, an anti-nausea drug made by Merrell Dow, during her pregnancy.

Bendectin had been introduced in 1957 to alleviate nausea associated with pregnancy and over the next quarter-century used by more than 33 million women all over the world. A significant number of children born to these women suffered birth defects, and the drug's manufacturer—Merrell National Laboratories and its successor Merrell Dow found itself involved in over a thousand lawsuits, the first major one of which was filed in 1977. Another family, the Schullers, brought a less widely known case against Merrell Dow. Their child, Eric Schuller, also of San Diego, was born in 1981 without a left hand and with one leg shorter than the other.

Merrell Dow moved for summary judgment, claiming Bendectin had not caused the child's disorder. In the affidavit authored by Dr. Steven H. Lamm, the author testified that he had reviewed multiple published human studies and concluded the use of Bendectin during the first trimester of pregnancy was not supposed to be a health risk. In response to Merrell Dow's affidavit, the plaintiff presented eight affidavits solely based on animal testings, claiming the existence of a link between Bendectin and animal birth defects.

The court granted summary judgment for Merrell Dow and dismissed the case, finding Daubert's experts relied on evidence "not sufficiently established to have general acceptance in the field to which it belongs." The Court held that expert opinion which is not based on data from the field of epidemiology concerning Bendectin is not admissible to raise an issue regarding causation (in law) to the jury. In addition, the Court also ruled that although Daubert's experts recalculated data obtained from previously published epidemiologic studies, their findings were not considered admissible because they were neither published nor subjected to peer review. The plaintiffs appealed the decision, and, in due course, the case reached the U. S. Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court did not apply their new Daubert standard to the case, but rather reversed the decision and remanded the case to the Ninth Circuit court. On remand, the Ninth Circuit applied the Daubert standard and again granted summary judgment for the defendant.

External links modified
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