Minnesota Is Not a Daubert State: Frye-Mack and the Hearing You Probably Do Not Get

Every year I read a motion in a Minnesota district court asking a judge to hold a Daubert hearing. Sometimes it’s a “Frye-Mack/Daubert” hearing, as if the two were one doctrine with a slash in the middle. Minnesota considered Daubert squarely, in a unanimous opinion, and turned it down. But the bigger mistake is the one underneath.

In Minnesota, the vast majority of expert testimony never gets a Frye-Mack hearing at all, and isn’t entitled to one. That’s the treating physician on causation, the accident reconstructionist, the appraiser, the CPA, the standard-of-care expert in a malpractice case. Frye-Mack is triggered only when the proffered evidence is both novel and scientific. Everything else is admitted or excluded under Minn. R. Evid. 702’s first three requirements. A lawyer who moves for a Frye-Mack hearing on non-novel testimony is asking for a label, not a standard. A judge who grants one is doing the same analysis under a different name.

Minnesota rejected Daubert on purpose, and said why

Goeb v. Tharaldson, 615 N.W.2d 800 (Minn. 2000), is a toxic-tort case. A pest-control operator applied insecticides including Dursban in an empty rental house on March 31, 1990. The Goeb family arrived to move in two days later and got sick. Their two causation experts were excluded, and without causation evidence the case died on summary judgment. Chief Justice Blatz wrote for a court sitting en banc. There’s no dissent and no concurrence. I checked the reported opinion end to end.

The question was whether Minnesota should drop Frye-Mack for Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The court said no, and it wasn’t a shrug about precedent. It was a deliberate choice about who gets to decide what counts as science.

Having reviewed the cases and the commentary surrounding this issue, we reaffirm our adherence to the Frye-Mack standard and reject Daubert.

Goeb, 615 N.W.2d at 814.

The reasoning is worth reading in the court’s own words, because it explains why Minnesota hasn’t drifted back. The court took seriously the standard knock on Frye, that it “‘abdicates’ judicial responsibility for determining admissibility to scientists uneducated in the law” — and then turned it around:

However, in repossessing the power to determine admissibility for the courts, Daubert takes from scientists and confers upon judges uneducated in science the authority to determine what is scientific.

Id. at 812. The court’s answer was that “the Frye general acceptance standard ensures that the persons most qualified to assess scientific validity of a technique have the determinative voice.” Id. at 813. Its second reason was uniformity. Because general acceptance is reviewed as a question of law, the appellate court can settle a technique once for the whole state. Under Daubert’s abuse-of-discretion review, “each federal district court will need to consider the admissibility of polygraph evidence anew each time it is raised,” and disparate district rulings “may not be correctable at the appellate level.” Id. at 814.

The court also took apart the idea that Frye-Mack is just the stricter rule. Daubert has been “viewed as relaxing the barriers to the admissibility of expert evidence,” but in practice it “does not necessarily make admissible expert evidence that was not admissible under Frye.” Id. at 812. Twenty-six years of federal practice since haven’t made that any less true.

What Rule 702 actually says

Start with the text. In Minnesota the rule isn’t the same rule as the federal one, and hasn’t been since 2006.

If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise. The opinion must have foundational reliability. In addition, if the opinion or evidence involves novel scientific theory, the proponent must establish that the underlying scientific evidence is generally accepted in the relevant scientific community.

Minn. R. Evid. 702. The first sentence is the original 1977 rule, and it’s word for word what Federal Rule 702 said until the amendment effective December 1, 2000. That’s why the argument for importing Daubert got any traction at all, and why Goeb had to answer it. The argument there was that “Rule 702 of the Minnesota Rules of Evidence is identical to its federal counterpart, and as such it does not contain any reference to the general acceptance standard.” Goeb, 615 N.W.2d at 813. The court answered with a timeline: the Minnesota rules were promulgated in 1977, Mack came in 1980, Schwartz in 1989, and “[t]here have been no developments in Minnesota since Mack and Schwartz to convince us that the Frye-Mack standard is now incompatible with those same rules of evidence in existence at the time of these decisions.” Id. at 813–14. The two bolded sentences were added by amendment effective September 1, 2006, and they’re the whole story. The Revisor’s published rule carries exactly one amendment note. Nothing has touched Rule 702 since.

Read those two added sentences carefully. They do different jobs, and lawyers mash them together all the time.

Sentence two is unconditional. “The opinion must have foundational reliability.” Every opinion. Novel or ancient, scientific or not, a metallurgist or a real-estate appraiser.

Sentence three is conditional. It applies “if the opinion or evidence involves novel scientific theory,” and what it requires is general acceptance, not reliability.

The advisory committee said the amendment “codifies existing Minnesota case law on the admissibility of expert testimony,” and pointedly wouldn’t say what reliability looks like: “The required foundation will vary depending on the context of the opinion, but must lead to an opinion that will assist the trier of fact.” On the trigger, the committee said just as little: “The rule does not define what is novel, leaving this for resolution by the courts.” That sentence has generated more litigation than the rest of the rule combined.

The four-part test, and why only one part is Frye-Mack

The Minnesota Supreme Court stated the current test in a single sentence in State v. Obeta, 796 N.W.2d 282 (Minn. 2011):

Under this rule, expert testimony is admissible if: (1) the witness is qualified as an expert; (2) the expert’s opinion has foundational reliability; (3) the expert testimony is helpful to the jury; and (4) if the testimony involves a novel scientific theory, it must satisfy the Frye-Mack standard.

Id. at 289.

Then, in Doe v. Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis, 817 N.W.2d 150 (Minn. 2012), the court said the part that decides most motions:

All expert testimony must satisfy the first three parts of the Rule 702 test. It is only when the proponent offers “novel” “scientific” evidence that the fourth part of the test, the Frye-Mack standard, applies.

Id. at 164–65. Frye-Mack isn’t the standard for expert evidence in Minnesota. It’s a conditional add-on at the end of the standard.

And when it does apply, it adds two requirements to the three that are already there. One is general acceptance of the underlying science. The other is a showing that the particular evidence in the particular case is foundationally reliable, which in the classic formulation “requires the ‘proponent of a * * * test [to] establish that the test itself is reliable and that its administration in the particular instance conformed to the procedure necessary to ensure reliability.’” State v. Moore, 458 N.W.2d 90, 98 (Minn. 1990), quoting State v. Dille, 258 N.W.2d 565, 567 (Minn. 1977). State v. Roman Nose, 649 N.W.2d 815 (Minn. 2002), put the same two prongs in plainer language: the standard “asks first whether experts in the field widely share the view that the results of scientific testing are scientifically reliable, and second whether the laboratory conducting the tests in the individual case complied with appropriate standards and controls.” Id. at 819.

There’s a trap in the phrase “foundational reliability,” and it has cost lawyers motions. It shows up twice in Minnesota expert practice, and Doe is the case that untangles it. Once, it’s the universal Rule 702 requirement that applies to every opinion. Again, it’s the second Frye-Mack prong that applies to a particular scientific test. Then the court said something that ought to change how these motions get litigated:

While Frye-Mack deals with the reliability of a scientific test and Rule 702 deals with the reliability of an expert’s opinion, the underlying foundational reliability analysis is substantially the same. Therefore, it makes little difference whether the district court called the analysis a “Frye-Mack” analysis or a “Rule 702” analysis.

Id. at 168. In Doe the district court ran what it called a Frye-Mack hearing on repressed-and-recovered-memory theory. The supreme court never decided whether Frye-Mack governed that testimony at all. It didn’t have to, because the district court’s order “cut to the heart of the foundational reliability question,” id. at 169, and on this record the label made no difference. The exclusion stood. Fighting over what to call the hearing is, in most cases, wasted paper.

So what actually triggers a Frye-Mack hearing?

Two conditions, and you need both. The evidence has to be novel, and it has to be scientific. Miss either one and the fourth part of the test drops out.

On “scientific,” Jacobson v. $55,900 in U.S. Currency, 728 N.W.2d 510 (Minn. 2007), is the cleanest statement. The court held that “the Frye-Mack test applies to ‘evidence based on emerging scientific techniques,’ … and the technique of using trained dogs to detect drug odors is neither emerging nor scientific.” Id. at 528, quoting State v. Jobe, 486 N.W.2d 407, 419 (Minn. 1992). A handler reading a dog’s behavior offers an expert opinion about a living animal, not the output of a scientific process. Rule 702 governs. Frye-Mack doesn’t.

On behavioral and social science, State v. MacLennan, 702 N.W.2d 219 (Minn. 2005), draws the line. The defendant offered battered-child-syndrome testimony to support self-defense, and the district court excluded it under Frye-Mack. The supreme court said that was the wrong framework:

[E]xpert testimony on syndromes, unlike DNA evidence or other physical science, is not the type of evidence that the analytic framework established by Frye-Mack was designed to address. Accordingly, we conclude that the Frye-Mack standard does not govern the admissibility of expert testimony on battered child syndrome.

Id. at 233. The court drew a distinction “between scientific evidence derived from a specific test or diagnosis and expert testimony that offers an explanation for a person’s behavior,” id. at 232–33 — and that distinction is carrying real weight. Syndrome experts don’t run a test. They describe a pattern. So the court held that “courts should use Minn. R. Evid. 702 to discern whether this evidence would be helpful to the jury,” id., and reversed the district court’s choice of standard while affirming the exclusion on relevance. Id. at 234.

On “novel,” the short answer is that novelty wears off. Once the supreme court has held a technique generally accepted, the first prong is settled and stays settled:

When the scientific technique that produces the scientific evidence is no longer novel or emerging, then the pretrial hearing should focus on the second prong of the Frye-Mack standard.

Roman Nose, 649 N.W.2d at 819. That’s why a DNA case in 2026 is a fight about laboratory protocol, contamination, and validation of a specific run, not about whether DNA typing works.

Two older cases show how blunt the “not novel” holding can be. In State v. Hodgson, 512 N.W.2d 95 (Minn. 1994), the court dispatched a Frye challenge to forensic odontology in one line: “we are satisfied that basic bite-mark analysis by a recognized expert is not a novel or emerging type of scientific evidence.” Id. at 98. And in State v. Klawitter, 518 N.W.2d 577 (Minn. 1994), the court looked at the twelve-step drug-recognition protocol and concluded it “is not itself a scientific technique but rather a list of the things a prudent, trained and experienced officer should consider before formulating or expressing an opinion whether the subject is under the influence of some controlled substance.” Id. at 584. Then the court wrote a sentence I’ve quoted in briefs more than once: “the protocol, in the main, dresses in scientific garb that which is not particularly scientific.” Id. at 585. It also ordered that “in the courtroom the officer shall not be called a ‘Drug Recognition Expert.’” Id. The title itself assumed the conclusion.

Here’s where that leaves you:

Look at what’s missing from that table: medical opinions on standard of care, treating-physician causation testimony, engineering reconstruction, valuation, accounting. None of it is novel, and much of it isn’t scientific in the Frye-Mack sense. It lives entirely in the first three parts of Rule 702. That’s the practical center of this subject, and it’s why the “let’s get a Frye-Mack hearing” reflex wastes so much money. In a medical malpractice case the real gatekeeping happens earlier and somewhere else: at the expert affidavit that Minn. Stat. § 544.42 requires, on the statutory disclosure clock, and in the trial-procedure rules that shape what the expert may say. Same in a valuation dispute, where the fight is over who carries the burden of proof on value, not over whether the appraiser’s methodology is “novel.”

The half of the name that isn’t Frye

State v. Mack, 292 N.W.2d 764 (Minn. 1980), reached the supreme court on a certified question out of Hennepin County, before any probable-cause determination had been made. The complaining witness had been hospitalized with a severe injury she couldn’t account for. Some six weeks later, arranged by a Minneapolis police lieutenant, she was hypnotized by a self-taught lay hypnotist in Roseville. Two officers came into the room partway through and tape-recorded the rest. The next day she gave police a typewritten statement describing a knife assault. The question was whether she could testify to what she “remembered” under hypnosis.

Five experts on hypnosis and memory testified at the omnibus hearing. Justice Wahl, writing for the court en banc, held the testimony inadmissible. The passage that matters is the reason:

Under the Frye rule, the results of mechanical or scientific testing are not admissible unless the testing has developed or improved to the point where experts in the field widely share the view that the results are scientifically reliable as accurate.

Id. at 768. And then the specific failing: “Neither the person hypnotized nor the expert observer can distinguish between confabulation and accurate recall in any particular instance.” Id. at 769. The holding cuts both ways and says so. The court wouldn’t let the rule turn on which side offered the evidence:

Regardless of whether such evidence is offered by the defense or by the prosecution, a witness whose memory has been “revived” under hypnosis ordinarily must not be permitted to testify in a criminal proceeding to matters which he or she “remembered” under hypnosis.

Id. at 771. The court then skipped the constitutional question and decided the case on evidence grounds alone: “Because we hold that the proffered testimony does not meet ordinary standards of reliability for admission, we need not reach defendant’s constitutional challenges.” Id. at 772.

Now here’s the part that’s almost never said out loud: the phrase “foundational reliability” appears nowhere in Mack. I searched the full text of the opinion. Mack talks about evidence that is “scientifically reliable as accurate” and about “ordinary standards of reliability for admission.” The second prong of “Frye-Mack” is a label the court hung on Mack later. It did it in Goeb at 809, describing Mack as having “added an additional consideration to the Frye analysis,” and in Moore at 98, which supplied the working test by quoting Dille. That’s no knock on the doctrine. It’s a warning about arguing from the name. Brief the second prong by reasoning from what Mack held, and you’re reasoning from a hypnosis case about memory, not from the test the court actually applies.

The standard of review splits, and that decides how you argue the motion

This is the single most useful thing in Minnesota expert practice, and Goeb says it in two sentences:

The standard of review of admissibility determinations under Frye-Mack is two-pronged. Whether a particular principle or technique satisfies the first prong, general acceptance in the relevant scientific field, is a question of law that we review de novo. … District court determinations under the second prong, foundational reliability, are reviewed under an abuse of discretion standard, as are determinations of expert witness qualifications and helpfulness.

Goeb, 615 N.W.2d at 815. The de novo half goes back to State v. Fenney, 448 N.W.2d 54 (Minn. 1989), where the court took up electrophoretic typing of dried bloodstains as an issue of first impression and said flatly, “We review the issue de novo as it presents a question of law.” Id. at 58. The discretionary half goes back to Moore, where the court held that “[t]he determination of a proper foundation rests within the sound discretion of the trial court,” 458 N.W.2d at 98, and that the sufficiency of an expert’s qualifications rests there too, id. at 96.

Rule 702’s universal foundational-reliability requirement gets the same deference. Doe says it in one line: “We review a district court’s evidentiary rulings, including rulings on foundational reliability, for an abuse of discretion.” 817 N.W.2d at 164, citing State v. Loving, 775 N.W.2d 872, 877 (Minn. 2009).

There’s counter-authority. Klawitter, decided six years before Goeb, reviewed the trial judge’s Frye general-acceptance ruling deferentially. The court wrote that the trial judge didn’t abuse her discretion or arrive at a clearly erroneous conclusion in finding that the nystagmus tests satisfied Frye. 518 N.W.2d at 585. You can’t square that with Goeb’s later holding. I follow Goeb. It’s the more recent statement, it takes on the standard of review directly rather than in passing, and every later decision I’ve read applies it. But if you’re the party defending a general-acceptance ruling on appeal, Klawitter is in the reporter and you should expect to see it cited.

In practice, the split means these two prongs are two different appeals.

• Lose on general acceptance and you’ve got a legal question the court of appeals will decide fresh. Build a record that reads like a treatise: survey literature, peer review, error rates, adoption by the relevant community, testimony from people who aren’t your retained expert.
• Lose on foundational reliability and you’re arguing abuse of discretion, which is a hard road. That fight has to be won in the district court, on the record, at the hearing. Goeb is the cautionary tale. The plaintiffs’ experts were excluded because one hadn’t reviewed all of the plaintiffs’ pre-exposure medical records and had relied primarily on the oral history they gave her, and the other had said in an affidavit that he reviewed medical records and then conceded at deposition that he never requested them. 615 N.W.2d at 815–16; see id. at 808. No appellate standard rescues that.

What the supreme court has refused to decide

Two open questions sit at the center of this area, and both matter more than most of the decided cases.

Toxic-tort causation methodology is unresolved. Goeb gets cited constantly for the idea that a causation expert must quantify dose. It doesn’t hold that. Dow argued that dose is a prerequisite. The plaintiffs argued that temporal relationship, differential diagnosis, and symptom literature can carry causation without it. The court set the dispute down and walked away from it:

While we recognize the discord regarding the necessity of chemical exposure levels for establishing causation, we need not decide what the generally accepted methodology should be because the second prong of the Frye-Mack standard is dispositive here.

Id. at 815. The court left that question open in 2000, and I’ve found no decision since that answers it. Anyone who tells you Goeb requires a dose calculation is reading the district court’s findings as if they were the supreme court’s holding.

As of Hull in 2010, fingerprint and handwriting comparison had never been held generally accepted by the Minnesota Supreme Court, and I’ve found no decision since that does. In State v. Hull, 788 N.W.2d 91 (Minn. 2010), the district court limited both the fingerprint and the handwriting admissibility hearings to the second prong on the premise that general acceptance was established. The defendant argued on appeal that the court had never squarely held either technique generally accepted. The State answered with two lines of dicta: the Hodgson observation that fingerprint comparisons “are routinely used to prove that a particular person was present at a particular place or did a specific act,” and a statement in State v. Anderson, 379 N.W.2d 70, 79 (Minn. 1985), that handwriting analysis is “widely accepted by this court and others as a means to identify a signature as that of a particular signer.” The supreme court didn’t resolve it: “we decline to decide whether the district court erred in failing to hold a complete Frye-Mack hearing before admitting the evidence,” because any error was harmless. Id. at 104. The question is live.

There’s also a live disagreement inside the court about how far Frye-Mack reaches. Doe drew two dissents. Justice Paul H. Anderson, joined by Justice Meyer, would have held Frye-Mack inapplicable to repressed-memory testimony altogether, reading Jacobson to confine the standard to “emerging scientific techniques” and MacLennan to place behavioral-science explanations outside it. Doe, 817 N.W.2d 150 (Anderson, P.H., J., dissenting). The majority didn’t have to resolve the boundary because it held the analysis was substantially the same either way. So the boundary sits where the majority left it: undrawn, and open to argument.

The federal contrast, stated as federal law

If your case can be filed in either forum, the expert rules are a real variable, and lately they’ve moved in one direction only.

Federal Rule of Evidence 702 now reads:

A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if the proponent demonstrates to the court that it is more likely than not that: (a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue; (b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; (c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and (d) the expert’s opinion reflects a reliable application of the principles and methods to the facts of the case.

The rule’s history line records amendments effective December 1, 2000, December 1, 2011, and December 1, 2023. The 2023 amendment is the one to know. The Advisory Committee said “the rule has been amended to clarify and emphasize that expert testimony may not be admitted unless the proponent demonstrates to the court that it is more likely than not that the proffered testimony meets the admissibility requirements set forth in the rule,” and then told the federal courts flat out that many of them had been getting it wrong:

But many courts have held that the critical questions of the sufficiency of an expert’s basis, and the application of the expert’s methodology, are questions of weight and not admissibility. These rulings are an incorrect application of Rules 702 and 104(a).

Fed. R. Evid. 702, Committee Notes on Rules — 2023 Amendment. The amendment also revised subdivision (d) so that “each expert opinion must stay within the bounds of what can be concluded from a reliable application of the expert’s basis and methodology,” a change the committee said is “especially pertinent to the testimony of forensic experts in both criminal and civil cases.”

Two other federal decisions shape the comparison, and the Minnesota Supreme Court walked through both in Goeb. General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997), holds that admissibility rulings under Rule 702 are reviewed for abuse of discretion, all of them, including the science. Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999), extends Daubert gatekeeping beyond science to technical and other specialized knowledge, and describes the Daubert factors as “helpful, not definitive,” with district courts given “considerable leeway.”

The practical upshot cuts both ways and depends on the expert. A cutting-edge methodology with strong internal validation and thin field adoption is harder to get in under Minnesota’s rule, because general acceptance is the question and a well-credentialed minority may not be enough. A conventional, generally accepted method applied sloppily is at greater risk in federal court after the 2023 amendment, because the federal judge is told to test the application, not just the method, and to do it by a preponderance. Neither forum is uniformly friendlier. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

How I work these motions

A few rules I stick to.

1. Decide first whether the fourth part is even in play. If the opinion isn’t novel and scientific, don’t brief Frye-Mack. Brief qualification, reliability, and helpfulness, and cite Doe at 164–65 for why. You’ll get a faster and cleaner ruling.
2. If the science is genuinely novel, protect the de novo record. General acceptance is a legal question on appeal. Put the literature, the error rates, and the independent adoption evidence in the district court file, whether or not the district court seems interested. The court of appeals will look at that record fresh.
3. Assume the reliability fight is the whole case. Goeb was decided on prong two, and so are most Minnesota expert rulings I read. Reliability is proved with documents: what the expert reviewed, what protocol was followed, what validation exists, what was done in this instance. The burden is on the side offering the opinion. For novel scientific evidence, “[t]he proponent of the novel scientific evidence bears the burden of establishing the proper foundation for the admissibility of the evidence,” MacLennan, 702 N.W.2d at 230, and under Rule 702 generally, “the party seeking to introduce the alert and related testimony must establish an adequate foundation,” Jacobson, 728 N.W.2d at 528.
4. Depose to the affidavit. Both Goeb experts were destroyed by the gap between their affidavits and their depositions. That’s the most reliable way to lose an expert in Minnesota, and the most reliable way to take one out.
5. Don’t confuse an expert-disclosure gate with an admissibility gate. In a malpractice case the § 544.42 affidavits are a pleading-stage merits screen with their own deadlines and their own dismissal consequence. Getting past them says nothing about whether the opinion comes into evidence, and clearing Rule 702 says nothing about whether the affidavits were timely. I’ve seen both mistakes.
6. Watch what the adverse examiner is actually offering. A defense examination report in a personal injury case is expert opinion like any other, and the same three Rule 702 requirements apply to it. That’s a different question from what the examination order permits.

Minnesota’s rule isn’t softer than the federal rule. It’s a different shape. The scientific community gets the last word on whether a technique is science. The district court gets the last practical word on whether this expert did the work. The appellate court gets a fresh look at exactly one of those two questions. Know which question you’re in, and the motion writes itself.

Madgett Law, LLC litigates civil cases in Minnesota state and federal court where expert proof decides the outcome: personal injury and wrongful death, product and premises claims, professional negligence, business and valuation disputes, and consumer litigation. That work includes retaining and preparing experts, taking and defending expert depositions, briefing and arguing Rule 702 and Frye-Mack motions, and defending expert opinions on appeal. If an expert issue is about to decide your case, send us a message or call 612-470-6529.

Sources: Minn. R. Evid. 702, Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes’ published court rules, https://www.revisor.mn.gov/court_rules/ev/id/702/ — the rule is quoted in full above, and its only amendment note reads in full “(Amended effective September 1, 2006.)”. Minn. R. Evid. 702, Committee Comment — 2006 Amendment, from the same page, quoted for “The amendment codifies existing Minnesota case law on the admissibility of expert testimony,” for “The required foundation will vary depending on the context of the opinion, but must lead to an opinion that will assist the trier of fact,” and for “The rule does not define what is novel, leaving this for resolution by the courts.” Minn. R. Evid. 702, Committee Comment — 1977, from the same page, relied on for the pre-amendment scope of the rule. Goeb v. Tharaldson, 615 N.W.2d 800 (Minn. Aug. 17, 2000) (No. CX-98-2275), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/615/html/0800-01.html and https://static.case.law/nw2d/615/cases/0800-01.json; the reported case contains a single opinion, for the court en banc by Blatz, C.J., with no dissent or concurrence. Goeb is quoted at 809 (describing Mack as having “added an additional consideration to the Frye analysis”); at 812 (Daubert “takes from scientists and confers upon judges uneducated in science the authority to determine what is scientific”; the “‘abdicates’ judicial responsibility” criticism, itself quoted by the Goeb court from State v. Coon, 974 P.2d 386 (Alaska 1999); and the “period of ‘strict scrutiny’ of science by non-scientifically trained judges” characterization, which Goeb quotes from Lucinda M. Finley, 49 DePaul L. Rev. 335, 341 (Winter 1999) and which this article attributes to a commentator, not to the court); at 813 (general acceptance “ensures that the persons most qualified to assess scientific validity of a technique have the determinative voice”; and the appellants’ contention that “Rule 702 of the Minnesota Rules of Evidence is identical to its federal counterpart, and as such it does not contain any reference to the general acceptance standard,” which this article identifies as an argument the court was addressing, not as the court’s own holding); at 813–14 (the chronological answer to that contention, quoted above, with the bracketed capital marking the court’s “There”); the statement that Minnesota’s first sentence is word for word the then-current federal rule rests on Goeb’s footnote quoting Fed. R. Evid. 702 as it read in 2000 together with the federal rule’s own history line, which records the next amendment as effective December 1, 2000; that footnote is not pin-cited; at 814 (the reaffirmation of Frye-Mack and rejection of Daubert, quoted in full above; the two-prong recitation; and the polygraph non-uniformity passage, including “may not be correctable at the appellate level,” which begins on 814 rather than 813); at 815 (the two-pronged standard of review, quoted above with an ellipsis marking the omission of the intervening citation to State v. Fenney, 448 N.W.2d 54, 58 (Minn. 1989); the refusal to decide the generally accepted causation methodology); and at 815–16 (the specific reliability failings of Drs. Sherman and Kilburn — the district court found that Dr. Sherman “did not review all of appellants’ pre-exposure medical records and primarily relied on the oral history appellants gave her,” and that Dr. Kilburn, “in contrast to his affidavit,” admitted at deposition that he had not reviewed the medical records; the related finding at 808 that he “never requested or received appellants’ medical records” is cited alongside it). Goeb’s account of Daubert, Joiner, and Kumho Tire appears at 811–13 and is the route by which those federal decisions are described here. State v. Mack, 292 N.W.2d 764 (Minn. May 16, 1980) (No. 50036), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/292/html/0764-01.html and https://static.case.law/nw2d/292/cases/0764-01.json; quoted at 768 (the Frye rule as applied to mechanical or scientific testing), at 769 (confabulation and accurate recall), at 771 (the holding on hypnotically induced testimony), and at 772 (declining the constitutional question). The word “foundational” does not appear anywhere in Mack. State v. Fenney, 448 N.W.2d 54 (Minn. 1989), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/448/html/0054-01.html and quoted at 58 for de novo review of a general-acceptance question of law. State v. Moore, 458 N.W.2d 90 (Minn. 1990), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/458/html/0090-01.html and quoted at 98 for the foundational-reliability formulation drawn from State v. Dille, 258 N.W.2d 565, 567 (Minn. 1977) and for “The determination of a proper foundation rests within the sound discretion of the trial court,” and cited at 96 for the discretion accorded an expert’s qualifications; the asterisks inside that quotation are the reporter’s own elision, reproduced as printed. State v. Hodgson, 512 N.W.2d 95 (Minn. 1994), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/512/html/0095-01.html and quoted at 98, both for the bite-mark holding and for the sentence that fingerprint comparisons “are routinely used to prove that a particular person was present at a particular place or did a specific act” — which Hodgson itself quotes from C. Herasimchuk, A Practical Guide to the Admissibility of Novel Expert Evidence in Criminal Trials Under Federal Rule 702, 22 St. Mary’s L.J. 181, 210–11 (1990), and which State v. Hull, 788 N.W.2d at 104, later characterized as dicta. State v. Anderson, 379 N.W.2d 70 (Minn. 1985), is quoted at 79 for handwriting analysis being “widely accepted by this court and others as a means to identify a signature as that of a particular signer,” as quoted by Hull at 104. State v. Klawitter, 518 N.W.2d 577 (Minn. 1994), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/518/html/0577-01.html and quoted at 584 (the protocol is not itself a scientific technique) and at 585 (“dresses in scientific garb”; the “Drug Recognition Expert” naming order; and the deferential review of the trial court’s Frye ruling, which this article identifies as counter-authority to Goeb’s de novo holding rather than harmonizing it). State v. Roman Nose, 649 N.W.2d 815 (Minn. 2002), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/649/html/0815-01.html and quoted at 819 for both the plain-language two-prong formulation and the rule that a no-longer-novel technique narrows the hearing to prong two. State v. MacLennan, 702 N.W.2d 219 (Minn. 2005), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/702/html/0219-01.html and quoted at 233 (syndrome evidence outside the Frye-Mack framework; the test/behavior distinction; Rule 702 helpfulness governs), cited at 230 (the proponent’s burden and the observation that the court had not applied Frye-Mack to syndrome evidence) and at 234 (holding that the district court applied the wrong standard while affirming the exclusion on relevance). Jacobson v. $55,900 in U.S. Currency, 728 N.W.2d 510 (Minn. 2007), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/728/html/0510-01.html and quoted at 528, which itself quotes State v. Jobe, 486 N.W.2d 407, 419 (Minn. 1992); Jobe, Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/486/cases/0407-01.json. State v. Loving, 775 N.W.2d 872 (Minn. 2009), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/775/html/0872-01.html, at 877; cited, not quoted. State v. Hull, 788 N.W.2d 91 (Minn. 2010), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/788/html/0091-01.html and quoted at 104; the surrounding discussion at 103–04 is the basis for the statement that the district court limited both hearings to prong two and that the State relied on dicta in Hodgson and State v. Anderson, 379 N.W.2d 70 (Minn. 1985). State v. Obeta, 796 N.W.2d 282 (Minn. 2011), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/796/html/0282-01.html and quoted at 289 for the four-part test. Doe v. Archdiocese of Saint Paul & Minneapolis, 817 N.W.2d 150 (Minn. July 25, 2012) (No. A10-1951), Caselaw Access Project, https://static.case.law/nw2d/817/html/0150-01.html and https://static.case.law/nw2d/817/cases/0150-01.json (majority by G. Barry Anderson, J.; dissent by Paul H. Anderson, J.; separate dissent by Meyer, J., joining it; Stras, J., took no part); quoted at 164 (abuse-of-discretion review of foundational-reliability rulings, citing Loving), at 164–65 (all expert testimony must satisfy the first three parts; Frye-Mack applies only to novel scientific evidence), at 168 (the two analyses are substantially the same and the label makes little difference), and at 169 (the district court’s order “cut to the heart of the foundational reliability question”); the description of the 2006 amendment’s effect appears at 165–66, where the court states that the amendment “added these two sentences” and that foundational reliability is therefore considered “in two contexts,” the first applying to all experts’ opinions and the second only when Frye-Mack applies. The dissent of Paul H. Anderson, J., joined by Meyer, J., appears at 173–80; its position — that Frye-Mack should be confined to “emerging scientific techniques” per Jacobson and that MacLennan places behavioral-science explanations outside it — is stated at 173 and 176–79. Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and its Committee Notes on Rules — 2023 Amendment: U.S. Government Publishing Office, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2023-title28/pdf/USCODE-2023-title28-app-federalru-dup2-rule702.pdf (2023 edition of the U.S. Code, Title 28 Appendix — Rules of Evidence); the rule is quoted in full above, its history line reads “(Pub. L. 93–595, § 1, Jan. 2, 1975, 88 Stat. 1937; Apr. 17, 2000, eff. Dec. 1, 2000; Apr. 26, 2011, eff. Dec. 1, 2011; Apr. 24, 2023, eff. Dec. 1, 2023.)”, and the 2023 Committee Note is quoted for the preponderance clarification, for the correction of courts treating basis and application as weight rather than admissibility, and for the revision to subdivision (d). Frye v. United States, 293 F. 1013 (D.C. Cir. 1923), Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136 (1997), and Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999) are federal decisions, stated here as federal law; they are described as the Minnesota Supreme Court recounted and quoted them in Goeb at 809–13 and, for the federal rule’s own history, as the Advisory Committee described them in the 2000 and 2023 Committee Notes cited above. Minnesota adopted Frye in State v. Kolander, 236 Minn. 209, 52 N.W.2d 458 (1952), which is named here as reported in Goeb at 809 and Roman Nose at 818. State v. Hennum, 441 N.W.2d 793 (Minn. 1989), and State v. Helterbridle, 301 N.W.2d 545 (Minn. 1980), are referred to only as MacLennan characterizes and quotes them at 231, 233, and 234; neither is quoted here. This article does not state a rule about whether repressed-and-recovered-memory testimony, fingerprint comparison, or handwriting comparison satisfies the general-acceptance prong, because the Minnesota Supreme Court has not decided any of the three; Doe resolved the first on foundational reliability without reaching novelty, and Hull expressly declined to reach the second and third. This article is general legal information about Minnesota law, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Every case depends on its own facts, on the record actually built in the district court, and on the practices of the assigned judge. No outcome is promised or implied.