Yeah, I loved that thing about how the PT trackbacks had to be broken because hitting the URL with an HTTP GET request resulted in an error message.

Another “ticket” is FRCP Rule 26(c)(7), which says that the court may issue a protective order saying “that a trade secret or other confidential research, development, or commercial information not be revealed or be revealed only in a designated way.”

Yeah. Jones’s protective order appears to have been in full compliance with that. Larry asked for a rule of discovery. He apparently did not like it much that I came up with one.

Dembski may have felt that some parts of the manuscript were not ready for release. How would you like to be in the middle of working on a manuscript and then be told that you have to give a copy to an adversary in court?

Make up your mind, Larry. Are you discussing things in light of the law, or are you concocting legal-sounding rationalizations for the outcomes that you prefer emotionally? I notice that you called Ed Brayton a hypocrite for saying that he had an emotional preference for how a particular decision should go; it seems that you are expressing this in the very same sort of terms.

If I were forced to hand over a work prematurely to an adversary, it would suck in a major way. It would suck even more if I had stupidly opened the door to that result by bragging about how working on it had made me the expert of the moment in my expert report. The law, though, would care no more about whether I thought it sucked than it did for Dembski.

Here’s the footnote from page 9 of Judge Jones’s ruling on FTE’s motion to intervene:

1 It is clear to the Court that FTE improperly assumed that its rights would be protected so long as Dembski remained an expert for the Defendants. As such, we believe that the real motivation or underlying reason that FTE filed the instant Motion was because Defendants terminated Dembski as an expert in this case, which led FTE to conclude that its rights were no longer being protected. Notably however, Dembski was involved in this litigation only as a disclosed witness, and never as an agent or representative of FTE. It was only after Dembski apparently subjected The Design of Life to a premature release by including it in his March 30, 2005 expert report, as previously noted, that the various machinations which led to his termination commenced.

The example you gave of an “attempt to smear” was an honest mistake that was immediately retracted. Don’t you ever make mistakes?

First, I have no means of determining that Manzari and Cooper made “an honest mistake”. They made a mistake, certainly, but did they make it honestly? They set out to accuse Bryan Rehm and the new school board of malfeasance to the tune of \$1M. Their accusation was one that could be taken as saying their targets were criminally culpable. The accusation remains just as it was in their online article. This is what Larry is billing as the retraction, a bit of text at the end of the article in italics:

Editor’s note: Correction – The Dover Board considered rescinding the evolution policy at the December 5th meeting; Board member Bryan Rehm did not participate in the consideration.

The seriousness of the accusation of conflict of interest for Rehm at the December 5th meeting contrasts sharply with the sloppiness of the research to back it up, which, so far as I can see, didn’t exist. Manzari and Cooper just made it up. Any attempt to verify Rehm’s role in the December 5th meeting would have resulted in learning that Rehm, in fact, wasn’t present and wasn’t even yet a confirmed board member. I am, in fact, being generous in my criticism of Manzari and Cooper, since I am merely attributing laziness and assigning their error to ignorance. That’s sloppy and despicable, but not as despicable as the case would be if they were assumed to be competent researchers and knew full well that what they were writing about Rehm was a complete falsehood.

Yes, I make mistakes. In my PT article, I originally said Seth Cooper had a current DI affiliation. That wasn’t correct. I updated the post to show the correct affiliation information while using strikethrough markup that showed my original text. Readers of my page got an immediate advisory that the incorrect text was, in fact, incorrect. So for myself, I haven’t tried to act as though I don’t make mistakes, I try to provide the correct information as quickly as possible, and I have made sure that the erroneous information is marked as such at that point in the text.

Now, if I continued to claim that anyone who ever had a past association with the DI had a current affiliation with them, it would be perfectly appropriate to note my mistake in so identifying Seth Cooper in that PT post as a data point showing that tendency.

In parallel fashion, Cooper’s continuing predilection for assigning blame anywhere except where it lies is best appreciated by showing his past attempts to do so as well.

The example you gave of an “attempt to smear” was an honest mistake that was immediately retracted. Don’t you ever make mistakes?

–”Dembski said more than that TDoL existed. He noted that he had become its principal author.”—

Apparently he mentioned TDoL just to help show that he was an expert on TDoL’s predecessor, the 2nd edition of the book “Of Pandas and People.” He said, “Having worked so closely in revising, expanding, and updating the second edition of this book, I feel I know it better than anyone.”

Also, as I said, the plaintiffs demanded all material related to the Pandas book, and I mean “all.”

–”I am not a lawyer, but Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(a)(1)(B) looks like just the ticket:
(B) a copy of, or a description by category and location of, all documents, data compilations, and tangible things that are in the possession, custody, or control of the party and that the disclosing party may use to support its claims or defenses, unless solely for impeachment;” —
Another “ticket” is FRCP Rule 26(c)(7), which says that the court may issue a protective order saying “that a trade secret or other confidential research, development, or commercial information not be revealed or be revealed only in a designated way.”

Dembski may have felt that some parts of the manuscript were not ready for release. How would you like to be in the middle of working on a manuscript and then be told that you have to give a copy to an adversary in court?

Dembski said more than that TDoL existed. He noted that he had become its principal author. He bragged about TDoL’s “expansion in size and scope”. Dembski was staking part of his expert status on his having done this work. Both then and now, people have been arguing that Dembski should not have to actually let those he opposed see what basis there was for his bragging. That could expose him to impeachment, after all. The plaintiffs’s response, which I linked to, laid out the various arguments why TDoL was properly requested. We know by the judge’s order that he concurred in part with their arguments.

What “rules of discovery”? Can you cite a rule of discovery that requires a party to turn over anything that is mentioned in an expert witness report?

I am not a lawyer, but Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26(a)(1)(B) looks like just the ticket:

(B) a copy of, or a description by category and location of, all documents, data compilations, and tangible things that are in the possession, custody, or control of the party and that the disclosing party may use to support its claims or defenses, unless solely for impeachment;

Dembski’s expert report showed that Dembski might use TDoL to support his claims at trial. Its appearance in the expert report cannot be interpreted as evidence that he intended the opposite, that is, never to mention it at all at trial.

Try installing Ghostscript and Ghostview. Then you can use Ghostview to look at PDFs. I have a computer that for some reason rejected Adobe Acrobat Reader, and Ghostview does fine for me there.

Sorry, but when I click on the link, I just get the message, “file is damaged and cannot be repaired.” I have a lot of trouble trying to read pdf files on this computer. Anyway, you have said nothing here that suggests that the file might refute my arguments.

It’s not inconvenient — it’s just irrelevant.

In the part of Dembski’s expert witness report that you quoted above, Dembski did not quote or paraphrase anything in the draft manuscript of the Design of Life — he only mentioned the manuscript’s existence. His mere mention of the manuscript’s existence did not give the plaintiffs a license to go on a fishing expedition.

The plaintiffs probably would have demanded the manuscript even if Dembski had not mentioned it in his expert witness report, because the plaintiffs were demanding everything — past, present, and future — that had any connection to the book Of Pandas and People, including emails, letters, telephone records, and office memos. See Jon Buell’s motion to quash the subpoena at —
http://www2.ncseweb.org/kvd/all_legal/2005-05_FTE-related/2005-05_FTE_subpoena_Pandas_drafts/2005-05-09_FTE_motion_quash_subpoena.pdf

—”Yes, Dembski identified chapters posted as being part of the forthcoming book.” –

Dembski was not obligated to disclose the whole draft manuscript just because he had posted parts of it. There may have been parts that he had good reason to withhold — for example, he might have intended to revise them or might have wanted others to review them before release.

–”That sort of speculation will be just as productive as wishing the rules of discovery were different than they are.”—

What “rules of discovery”? Can you cite a rule of discovery that requires a party to turn over anything that is mentioned in an expert witness report?

– “Tell me again about what “dead horse” you want to talk about.” –

The “dead horse” is the false charge that a new school board member was guilty of a conflict of interest because he was a Dover plaintiff and allegedly voted on a board decision concerning the lawsuit. The charge was withdrawn almost immediately.