ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the legal history leading up to Daubert, and explores some of the difficulties Daubert brought in its wake. It provides an account of truth in the sciences and shows why the legal system so often fails to get the best scientific information available. The chapter also shows how false scientific claims sometimes get legally entrenched as reliable science. “Science” encompasses some of the most remarkable achievements of the human mind, some near-miracles of “patience and postponement, choking down of preference” as those heroes of the history of science have figured out this or that aspect of the world, and a good deal more routine but solid and significant investigation. The law looks to precedent, and courts sometimes continue to follow earlier rulings based on now-superseded science. Truths to the effect that the law is thus and so has to be understood to be specific to a jurisdiction and to a time.
