can toxic tort lawyers learn from fruit flies ?
The lesson, it seems, is that toxic tort lawyers will devote increasing amounts of energy to arguing the extent to which studies of animals – or even insects – are or should be admissible and persuasive for purposes of reaching conclusions regarding cause and effect in humans. Today, defendants are usually (not always) happy to argue that the only “credible science” is a double-blind epidemiological study that shows a relationship between exposure and harm at a relative risk at or above 2.0, or some variation of that theme, as illustrated by this simple but useful outline of some state law cases after Daubert. On the other hand, plaintiffs, especially early movers, are often (but not always) forced to place faith in other forms of science because it often takes years to create and execute a double-blind epidemiological study, if it can be done at all. The fruit fly teaches us that these debates will becoming increasingly informed by phylogenetics, a field of science that seeks to offer
