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This article examines the challenges posed by expert testimony within the context of the US legal system, focusing primarily on the rules of evidence and judicial practices regulating admissibility—most notably Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence and the interpretive framework provided by the Daubert trilogy. Although many of the epistemological concerns discussed may have broader significance, the analysis is firmly grounded in the American adversarial tradition. Whitin this framework, this article aims to show that in the absence of effective criteria for establishing the reliability of expert testimony, the meta-rule for the admission of evidence proposed by Laudan in Truth, Error and Criminal Trial is unusable. Judges are laypeople burdened with the complicated task of distinguishing reliable experts from charlatans. However, from an epistemic perspective, this situation is extremely challenging. Indeed, due to the epistemic asymmetry between laypeople and experts, judges are in a very weak epistemic position to carry out their gatekeeping duty, and unfortunately the Daubert standard does not seem to be useful in this respect. What I would like to show is that using a meta-rule for evaluating evidence based on the concept of reliability without previously addressing the question of how to determine the reliability of expert testimony is putting the cart before the horse.
