Industries attack sympathetic legal procedures as biased against science

Evidence

While acknowledging “bona fide cases of silicosis in which plaintiffs have been represented by lawyers of ability and integrity,” the industry regarded most of the cases as without merit. They would have preferred to “exterminate” their “mutual malady—the system lawyer and quack doctor.” They also would have liked to eliminate lay juries from liability cases: “We are not here dealing with the type of injury which the layman can visualize and understand, such as a broken arm or a broken leg, but with a very complex lung condition which is not understood even by the medical profession generally” (Hirth, 1936). In the industry’s view, lay jurors were ill equipped to weigh conflicting testimony between the plaintiff’s experts and those of the defendant, or testimony “couched in such language as to be wholly unin-telligible to the jury and often to the Court” (Hirth, 1936). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1808

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the vault’s authoritarianism claims: the industry disqualifies lay democratic participation (juries) as incompetent, seeking to move dispute resolution into technical expert hands beyond mass control.
• DEEPTHINKING: The move is striking: industry simultaneously attacks lay juries as scientifically incompetent while its own expert scientists dismiss worker symptoms as ‘hysterical.’ Delegitimizes both lay judgment and victim testimony.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1808