VI. Conclusion: Science, Law, and Policy Support PAS’s Inadmissibility

Jennifer Hoult
Vol. 26 ♦ No. 1 ♦ Spring 2006
Children’s Legal Rights Journal
Evidentiary Admissibility of Parental Alienation Syndrome
http://209.198.129.131/images/EvidentiaryAmissibilityofPAW_Hoult_CLRJ_2006.pdf 

Excerpt see page 22
VI. Conclusion: Science, Law, and
Policy Support PAS’s
Inadmissibility
As a legal matter, PAS’s inadmissibility is
appropriate given its lack of scientific validity and
reliability.
404
 As a policy matter, its inadmissibility
is appropriate given its structural roots in an
unsubstantiated patriarchical theory that advocates for child sex offenders’ access to their
victims. The continued misrepresentation of
PAS’s scientific and legal status by its proponents,
including proponents’ deliberate circumvention of
legal gate-keeping by testifying about PAS under
other names, should place legal professionals on
alert for continued attempts to bring this
unsubstantiated hypothesis into American courts.
 PAS’s twenty-year run in American courts is
an embarrassing chapter in the history of
evidentiary law. It reflects the wholesale failure of
legal professionals entrusted with evidentiary gatekeeping intended to guard legal processes from the
taint of pseudo-science. Courts entrusted with
divorce, custody, and child abuse cases may have
found PAS attractive because it claimed to reduce
these complex, time-consuming, and wrenching
evidentiary investigations to medical diagnoses.
The goals inherent in PAS’s origins and legal use
demonstrate the policy risk of unquestioningly
accepting simplistic answers to complex human
problems. The unique dynamics of any given
dysfunctional family are unlikely to yield to pat
diagnoses.
405
 Given that most PA is adaptive and
resolves naturally in time, our legislature and
courts must determine under what circumstances
legal intervention is an appropriate or efficacious
response to PA. The answers to this complex
question will likely be found in empirically proven
science in the fields of psychology and developmental biology, not in unsubstantiated hypotheses
grounded in theories that violate public policy.
 Two decades after Gardner first described
PAS, an analysis of the materials he cited in
support of PAS’s existence demonstrates that PAS
remains merely an ipse dixit. As a matter of science,
law, and policy PAS is, and should remain,
inadmissible in American courts.

Jennifer Hoult
Vol. 26 ♦ No. 1 ♦ Spring 2006
Children’s Legal Rights Journal
Evidentiary Admissibility of Parental Alienation Syndrome
http://209.198.129.131/images/EvidentiaryAmissibilityofPAW_Hoult_CLRJ_2006.pdf