An interesting approach to how US courts understand science and all specialist subjects:
" For more than thirty years, federal judges have relied on something called the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, produced by the Federal Judicial Center and, in its latest edition, developed with NASEM. The manual is the thing a judge reaches for when a case involves DNA, or epidemiology, or toxicology, and the judge needs a neutral explanation of how the science works so they can tell reliable expert testimony from junk. It has been cited in more than 1,700 opinions and handed to thousands of judges. The whole value of the thing is its neutrality. It is supposed to teach judges how to weigh science, not tell them which side to believe.
The fourth edition, the first update in fifteen years, came out at the end of December 2025 with a brand-new chapter on climate science. And the chapter, it turned out, was written by people from one side of an active fight."
in the UK rather than fixing the textbook the rules fix who is to decide whether a witness is an expert or not and they do this by legalese and obfusation in their guidebooks:
https://www.cps.gov.uk/prosecution-guidance/expert-evidence
and guess who was head of the CPS in 2008:
Whatever you believe, the courts can twist and turn the evidence anyway they please and in an age of the Claw where politics make or break any career the government status quo usually ends up on top.
cheers