Science in the Patent Infringement Decision-Making Process: Problems and Proposed Reforms

The legal profession generally has been under a veritable siege in the past few years. Although criticism of the civil justice process has proceeded along many fronts, perhaps nowhere is it more telling than in the area of scientific evidence. Not only are judges and juries ill equipped to render competent decisions on the increasingly complex scientific issues before them, abuses of scientific evidence and the employment of so-called “junk science” or “funny science” are frequent. Such events do nothing to foster confidence in the legal system.