Galileo's
Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom
"This superb book is devastatingly funny, yet it is sad to see so many judges taken in by environmental and health hoaxes with a thin but misleading scientific patina." - Aaron Wildavsky, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley "By combining legal history, psychology, and sociology, Mr. Huber perceptively traces how the situation got out of hand." - Elisabeth Rosenthal, New York Times Book Review "Junk science! Peter Huber's catchy phrase accurately describes the kind of bogus science that increasingly pollutes the minds of ill-educated Americans. Huber's focus is on how junk science has invaded our courts in the form of so-called expert witnesses who for high fees- as Huber puts it, like hookers in June - will defend the most arrant nonsense. It would be amusing were it not for lives lost and medical careers ruined by legal malpractice that promotes medical quackery. Galileo's Revenge is a witty, informed, hard-hitting indictment of ignorant judges and greedy lawyers. Read it and weep." - Martin Gardner, author of Science: Good, Bad and Bogus and The New Age "Huber presents a lively history of how courts have tried to come to grips with sophisticated medicine and technology." - Betty Ann Kevles, Los Angeles Times "Expert" witnesses claim a luxury car accelerates when you step on the brake, though no defect is ever found. Whooping cough vaccine, said to cause brain damage and death, is almost removed from the market, though thirty years of epidemiological studies attest to its safety. Cerebral palsy cases, using electronic fetal monitoring (EFM) as evidence, flood the courts, despite overwhelming proof that EFM does not reduce birth defects. Spurious claims such as these, backed by fringe eccentrics whose "research" has no standing in the scientific community, have resulted in astronomical judgments that have bankrupted companies, driven doctors out of practice, and deprived all of us of superior technologies and effective and life-saving therapies. Peter Huber, an M.I.T.-trained engineer and one of the country's leading experts on liability law, offers a scathing indictment of how legions of case-hardened lawyers have successfully shifted the law from the rule of fact, using professional "expert" witnesses to press unsubstantiated claims on the basis of what nobody but a lawyer would call science. In the let-it-all-in atmosphere of today's courtrooms, lawyers have set off in pursuit of scientific speculators, cranks, and iconoclasts. "One way to dishonor Galileo is to imprison him for heresy," Huber writes. "Another, quite as effective, is to teach his views side by side with those of astrologers and mystics." Galileo's Revenge documents this peculiarly American phenomenon, showing how ancient rules of evidence do not discriminate between serious science and junk. Booknews, Inc., October 1, 1991
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