When Carmen Mistich was rear-ended by a large pickup truck traveling at least 40 m.p.h. faster than her Volkswagen on a highway just outside New Orleans, her car rolled over and she was hurled through the rear window because she wasn't wearing a seat belt. Two months later she died as a result of her injuries. Mistich's heirs presented Volkswagen with a product liability suit, and found no fewer than three "expert witnesses" willing to testify that Mistich died because the design of her car's seat anchorage system was flawed.

Despite the fact that the Volkswagen performed better that most cars in its class in a federal study of seat anchorage systems, the plaintiff's star witness, a self-proclaimed automobile design expert named Byron Bloch, testified that the Volkswagen seat represented "a unique aberration in design ... the weakest, minimalist seat anchorage ever put in a production car ... the worst seat anchorage system ever." And what were Byron Bloch's qualifications to offer an expert opinion? According to court records, Bloch had been dismissed from one college engineering program, was placed on academic probation by the electrical engineering and industrial design departments at a second college, then ended up getting a B.A. from a third school. He was laid off from his first job after three months, fired from his second after six months, fired from his third after less than a year and released from his fourth after two years. When he embarked on a career as a consultant, often testifying against Volkswagen, he hadn't worked on a single job involving automobiles, much less engineering.

Partly on the strength of Bloch's testimony, the family won its lawsuit and was awarded over $2 million in damages.

[Ed.: Preston Lerner of the Washington Monthly reports: "[The] Technical Advisory Service for Attorneys... has 24,000 experts on its rolls, up from 10,000 in 1987. Within the 758 pages of California's The Legal Expert Pages, browsers can find experts on everything from cemeteries and garage doors to theater and termites, not to mention William M. Jones, who bills himself as 'Mr. Truck.' 'There's an expert testifying in every field you can possibly imagine,' says Steven Babitsky, editor of The Expert Witness Journal. 'I remember one case in which a prison inmate who claimed he was no longer using drugs tried to get another prison inmate who was a drug addict qualified as an expert on drug addiction.' "]

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