Cite as: 526 U. S. 137 (1999)
Syllabus
testimony. General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U. S. 136, 138-139. That standard applies as much to the trial court's decisions about how to determine reliability as to its ultimate conclusion. Thus, whether Daubert's specific factors are, or are not, reasonable measures of reliability in a particular case is a matter that the law grants the trial judge broad latitude to determine. See id., at 143. The Eleventh Circuit erred insofar as it held to the contrary. Pp. 152-153.
2. Application of the foregoing standards demonstrates that the District Court's decision not to admit Carlson's expert testimony was lawful. The District Court did not question Carlson's qualifications, but excluded his testimony because it initially doubted his methodology and then found it unreliable after examining the transcript in some detail and considering respondents' defense of it. The doubts that triggered the court's initial inquiry were reasonable, as was the court's ultimate conclusion that Carlson could not reliably determine the cause of the failure of the tire in question. The question was not the reliability of Carlson's methodology in general, but rather whether he could reliably determine the cause of failure of the particular tire at issue. That tire, Carlson conceded, had traveled far enough so that some of the tread had been worn bald, it should have been taken out of service, it had been repaired (inadequately) for punctures, and it bore some of the very marks that he said indicated, not a defect, but abuse. Moreover, Carl-son's own testimony cast considerable doubt upon the reliability of both his theory about the need for at least two signs of abuse and his proposition about the significance of visual inspection in this case. Respondents stress that other tire failure experts, like Carlson, rely on visual and tactile examinations of tires. But there is no indication in the record that other experts in the industry use Carlson's particular approach or that tire experts normally make the very fine distinctions necessary to support his conclusions, nor are there references to articles or papers that validate his approach. Respondents' argument that the District Court too rigidly applied Daubert might have had some validity with respect to the court's initial opinion, but fails because the court, on reconsideration, recognized that the relevant reliability inquiry should be "flexible," and ultimately based its decision upon Carlson's failure to satisfy either Daubert's factors or any other set of reasonable reliability criteria. Pp. 153-158.
131 F. 3d 1433, reversed.
Breyer, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, Parts I and II of which were unanimous, and Part III of which was joined by Rehnquist, C. J., and O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, Souter, Thomas, and Ginsburg,
139
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