Illinois Legislature Considers Bill on Expert Testimony

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, we learn of a bill pending in the Illinois legislature that would: (1) move Illinois out of its Frye regime and into the Daubert column; (2) adopt the report requirements of Fed. R. Civ. P. 26; (3) provide for mandatory pretrial hearings on admissibility of expert testimony, upon motion; (4) require that a pretrial ruling on reliability objections issue no later than the final pretrial conference, setting forth "the findings of fact and conclusions of law upon which the order to admit or exclude expert evidence is based"; (5) provide for discretionary interlocutory appeal by any party disappointed by the court's ruling; and (6) undo the de novo standard of review announced in In re Simons, 211 Ill. 2d 523, 821 N.E.2d 1184 (2004), in favor of an "abuse of discretion" standard.

The bill would apply only in civil cases. A synopsis of HB 1896 appears at the website for the Illinois General Assembly, as does the full text of the proposed legislation.

Reasonable partisans could probably differ over whether Illinois should adopt Daubert and/or the report requirements of Rule 26, and any opinions we Pennsylvanians might have on those subjects would probably change nobody's mind. We cannot resist noting, however, that the bill's other provisions -- calling for mandatory pretrial hearings, mandatory "findings of fact and conclusions of law," and discretionary interlocutory appeals -- represent a marked departure from the federal model whose emulation the bill otherwise proposes.* Not to put too fine a point on it, they seem calculated to gum up the works.

Update 3/22/07: The Madison Record now reports that the bill has died in committee.

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* In theory, interlocutory appeals from federal pretrial evidentiary rulings might conceivably be had, in some circumstances, under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(b). In practice, this has almost never occurred.