As a statutory, rather than constitutional case, it is not necessarily binding on the states, but many courts of appeals are ordering remands or whole new hearings because the trial court failed to conduct a Daubert hearing, and there is frequent variation from state to state in how Daubert hearings are conducted. The fact is that Frye still remains the rule in many states. Other states have adopted Daubert , and yet other states have a history of rejecting Frye and Daubert , substituting their own standards. Of course, all this is subject to change, but was fairly accurate as of 1999, and I continue to get emails from people updating my information. Daubert may provide the impetus to amend Fed.
General acceptance is an austere standard absent from and incompatible with the Rules of Evidence.
The Daubert ruling substitutes a reliability test for a relevancy test. For states that follow neither Frye nor Daubert , this means that the continued practice of using reliability as a weight once relevancy has been established exposes a serious constitutional liability. All trial courts make a preliminary determination of admissibility. This job involves a preliminary assessment of whether the evidence is relevant, competent, and material. This ensures that flaws in the methodology would have been detected and that the technique is finding its way into use via the literature.