Basic Books, 1993, 228 pp, notes, acknowledgments, index, €21.40, ISBN 0-465-02624-9. page views.

About the Book

A scathing indictment of the growing role of junk science in our courtrooms. Peter W. Huber shows how time and again lawyers have used - and the courts have accepted - spurious claims by so-called expert witnesses to win astronomical judgments that have bankrupted companies, driven doctors out of practice and deprived us all of superiror technologies and effective, lifesaving therapies.

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 the 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

Huber's book should be required reading for every jurist worthy of his gavel.

Charlotte Allen
Washington Times

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 Waldavsky
Professor fo Political Science and Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley

An important and timely work by one of our tort system's most strident critics.

Science

About the Author

Peter W. Huber, an MIT-trained engineer and oneof the country's leading experts on liability law, is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and a Senior Fellow if the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences (BasicBooks, 1988).

Contents

• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Introduction
1. The Lawyer and the Scientist Trade Places
1. Liability Science - Better Living Through Litigation
2. The Science of Things That Aren't So - Junk Science and Its Origins
2. Law and Pseudoscience
3. The Midas Touch - How Money Causes Disease
4. Sudden Acceleration - Runaway Panic in the Mass Media
5. Gadgets and Knives - Cashing In on Magical Cures
6. No Immunity - Chemicals Cause Everything
7. Nausea - The Massed Legal Attack
8. The Paranoia Plebiscite - The Legal Pursuit of Fad Terrors
9. Harmonious Coupling - Ignoring the Environment
3. The Rule of Fact
10. The Cargo Cult - Does Liability Science Work?
11. Stopping Points - Confronting Malpractice on the Witness Stand
12. Science and Certitude
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index