Every injury case eventually turns on an expert. Joseph Sanders taught me to ask the harder question underneath: is the science actually there.
He has been on the University of Houston faculty since 1983, the A.A. White Professor of Law, with a doctorate in sociology to go with his law degree. His life’s work sits exactly where my work lives, at the seam between the courtroom and the laboratory: torts, toxic torts, products liability, and above all the role of the expert witness. He is a co-author of Modern Scientific Evidence, the treatise that judges and lawyers across the country open when they need to separate real science from something dressed up to look like it.
In his classroom you learned that “the expert said so” is not an argument. You learned to read the study, to check the method, to know the difference between a conclusion and the evidence for it. That is not academic. That is the exact skill that wins or loses a serious injury trial.
I carry his standard into every case that turns on medicine or engineering. Ask for the science. Then read it yourself.
Joseph Sanders, A.A. White Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center since 1983, co-author of Modern Scientific Evidence: The Law and Science of Expert Testimony, and a scholar of torts, products liability, and expert evidence.
