by American lawyer and author Mr. Peter Huber at the Bermuda Insurance Symposium.

Junk science is a grey area that is based more on "psychic, mystic and people who think they know things that nobody else does,'' rather than credible scientific evidence, said Mr. Huber.

He said there are countless examples of so-called experts being wheeled into courtrooms all over the US to support all manner of plaintiffs' claims in various court actions.

Many are virtually professional witnesses whose ill-founded evidence is used in one case after another in an attempt to sway juries into making large awards for damages, he said.

In the case of product liability actions, companies often lost out even if they actually won cases, because of heavy legal fees and loss of revenue caused by bad publicity.

Badly researched media coverage sometimes helps to exacerbate problems for companies, he added.

As an example, he cited the negative publicity surrounding a cluster of lawsuits which claimed that mechanical problems with Audi cars were to blame for several accidents, even though scientific tests proved there was nothing wrong with the model, said Mr. Huber.

"People who at first admitted they caused an accident by putting their foot on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake were later convinced by an attorney that they in fact did no such thing and a design fault was to blame,'' said Mr. Huber.

In this instance, the American television programme 60 Minutes exacerbated the situation by running a programme which heaped blame on the mechanics of the vehicle when there was no firm evidence to support it, he said.

The American legal system is currently waiting for a more definitive description of where courts should draw the line between "science and other bodies of faith, knowledge or ignorance,'' said Mr. Huber.

The ruling is expected soon as part of one of the most recent cases involving the drug Bendectin, which has been blamed for numerous birth defects dating back more than 20 years.

"This case richly illustrates how important the seemingly technical minutiae of the rules of evidence can be,'' he said.

"On the one hand, you have a child with a birth defect -- not all that hard to find when some 100,000 newborns a year have birth defects of some kind.'' US legal system slammed "You also have a mother who took Bendectin during pregnancy -- not hard to find either, since Bendectin was used by some 30 million pregnant women between 1956 and 1983. And you have the searing memory of Thalidomide babies born in Europe with flippers instead of arms.

"On the other hand, you have science. The first fears about Bendectin were raised in the 1960s and 1970s, soon after Thalidomide. Over 30 epidemiological studies, involving more than 130,000 Bendectin users were then conducted and exhaustively reviewed by the FDA and sister agencies elsewhere.

"No published study has since concluded that Bendectin does in fact increase the incidence of birth defects.

"A 1989 review by the Canadian government concluded that Bendectin `presents no measurable reproductive risk' and said it would be `a disservice to Canadian women to withdraw this drug from the market'.'' A judge's decision on what passes as scientific evidence often makes the difference between a plaintiff receiving a multi-million-dollar settlement or nothing at all, said Mr. Huber.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was a clear drift towards allowing all manner of evidence in courtrooms, he said. He added "litigators reacted predictably by searching ever more aggressively for the most outspoken supporters of the most readily cashable scientific theories. "As one litigator said: `If I got myself an impartial witness, I'd think I was wasting my money'.'' Mr. Huber said that "individual scientific mavericks'' have prospered for many years.

One medical graduate who failed his board certification exam five times and twice withdrew from taking it, provided evidence to help win a $49.2 million award against a Missouri soap manufacturer, said Mr. Huber.

"He has testified eight times under oath that he sat for board certification in internal medicine only once,'' said Mr. Huber.

Rules of evidence as to what legally constitutes science, as opposed to junk science, are crucial to avoid miscarriages of justice, he said.