Anecdotal Evidence - Scientific Evidence As Legal Evidence

Scientific Evidence As Legal Evidence

In certain situations, scientific evidence presented in court must also meet the legal requirements for evidence. For instance, in the United States, expert testimony of witnesses must meet the Daubert standard. This ruling holds that before evidence is presented to witnesses by experts, the methodology must be "generally accepted" among scientists. In some situations, anecdotal evidence may meet this threshold (such as certain case reports which corroborate or refute other evidence).

Altman and Bland argue that the case report or statistical outlier cannot be dismissed as having no weight: "With rare and uncommonly occurring diseases, a nonsignificant finding in a randomized trial does not necessarily mean that there is no causal association between the agent in question and the disease."

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