SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
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No. 92-102
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WILLIAM DAUBERT, et ux., etc., et al., PETITIONERS v. MERRELL DOW
PHARMACEUTICALS, INC. on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the ninth circuit [June 28, 1993]
  Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Stevens joins,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
  The petition for certiorari in this case presents two questions:
first, whether the rule of Frye v. United States, 54 App. D. C. 46,
293 F. 1013 (1923), remains good law after the enactment of the
Federal Rules of Evidence; and second, if Frye remains valid,
whether it requires expert scientific testimony to have been
subjected to a peer-review process in order to be admissible.  The
Court concludes, correctly in my view, that the Frye rule did not
survive the enactment of the Federal Rules of Evidence, and I
therefore join Parts I and II-A of its opinion.  The second
question presented in the petition for certiorari necessarily is
mooted by this holding, but the Court nonetheless proceeds to
construe Rules 702 and 703 very much in the abstract, and then
offers some -general observations.-  Ante, at 12.
  -General observations- by this Court customarily carry great
weight with lower federal courts, but the ones offered here suffer
from the flaw common to most such observations-they are not applied
to deciding whether or not particular testimony was or was not
admissible, and therefore they tend to be not only general, but
vague and abstract.  This is particularly unfortunate in a case
such as this, where the ultimate legal question depends on an
appreciation of one or more bodies of knowledge not judicially
noticeable, and subject to different interpretations in the briefs
of the parties and their amici.  Twenty-two amicus briefs have been
filed in the case, and indeed the Court's opinion contains no less
than 37 citations to amicus briefs and other secondary sources.
  The various briefs filed in this case are markedly different from
typical briefs, in that large parts of them do not deal with
decided cases or statutory language-the sort of material we
customarily interpret.  Instead, they deal with definitions of
scientific knowledge, scientific method, scientific validity, and
peer review-in short, matters far afield from the expertise of
judges.  This is not to say that such materials are not useful or
even necessary in deciding how Rule 703 should be applied; but
it is to say that the unusual subject matter should cause us to
proceed with great caution in deciding more than we have to,
because our reach can so easily exceed our grasp.
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