3M Company, et al. v. George Amador

In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., this Court held that, to be admissible, expert testimony must be “not only relevant, but reliable.” 509 U.S. 579, 589 (1993). In General Electric Co. v. Joiner, the Court firmly rejected the view that there is “a preference for admissibility” that requires a “particularly stringent standard” of appellate review of decisions to exclude expert testimony. 522 U.S. 136, 140-43 (1997). The decision below manages to violate both those clear precedents at once. As to initial admissibility, the Eighth Circuit’s lax standard— allowing expert testimony unless the testimony is “so fundamentally unsupported by its factual basis that it can offer no assistance to the jury,” App.12—conflates reliability and relevance. As to appellate review, the decision below ignores Joiner and undermines the district court’s gatekeeping role. Those errors are particularly glaring here since the expert testimony—made-for-litigation complaints about a medical device that is the industry standard used 50,000 times each day—is precisely the kind of unreliable testimony Daubert is designed to exclude. Even the appellate decision reversing the District Court’s well-considered decision to exclude acknowledges the testimony’s flaws. The result is that thousands of cases in a pending MDL will be adjudicated based on evidence that should be excluded twice-over based on this Court’s precedents. The questions presented are:

1. Whether the Eighth Circuit’s “sofundamentally-unsupported” standard of initial admissibility for expert testimony conflicts with this Court’s precedents and Federal Rule of Evidence 702.

2. Whether the Eighth Circuit’s insufficiently deferential standard of appellate review of decisions excluding expert testimony conflicts with this Court’s precedents and Federal Rule of Evidence 702.