Sunday, March 06, 2005

9th Circuit Reverses Exclusion of Title VII Plaintiff's Statistical Evidence

The Ninth Circuit has reversed the trial court's exclusion of plaintiff's statistical evidence in a Title VII suit alleging that a Navy shipyard has discriminated against persons of Asian-American ancestry. See Obrey v. Johnson, 03-16849 (9th Cir. Mar. 4, 2005) (Brunetti, Graber, & Bybee, JJ.).

posted by pn at 9:44 AM  

1 Comments:

Anonymous writes ...

This case again shows that Courts are getting a better handle on statistical evidence. In particular, as an economist and statistician who performs these types of analyses on a regular basis, I was struck by the how the court appeared to realize that basically all statistical models are incomplete by nature. More and more, simply pointing out this fact does not appear to be sufficient for the court to exclude the statistical expert's testimony (see excerpt below). This suggest that in future cases, if the parties are serious about excluding testimony, they will have to make sure that the expert directly addresses the relability issues and does not just discuss the shortcommings in the opposing experts statistical model.


From the opinion Obrey’s statistical evidence was not rendered irrelevant
under Rule 402 simply because it failed to account for the relative
qualifications of the applicant pool. See FED. R. EVID.
402 (“All relevant evidence is admissible, except as otherwise
provided [by law]. Evidence which is not relevant is not
admissible.”) A statistical study may fall short of proving the
plaintiff’s case, but still remain relevant to the issues in dispute.
The Dannemiller study may be relevant, and therefore
admissible, even if it is not sufficient to establish Obrey’s
prima facie case or a claim of pretext.


Dwight Steward, Ph.D.
Director of Employment Research
Econ One
dsteward@econone.com

8:41 AM  

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Fed. R. Evid. 702: If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise, if (1) the testimony is based upon sufficient facts or data, (2) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods, and (3) the witness has applied the principles and methods reliably to the facts of the case.