The Bocca family was recently awarded €174,000 in Italian courts in a case in which they claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism in their son Valentino. This is not a determination made in a scientific setting, but in a court room. It smells of the Illinois senate decision that "as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois' night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status". The ability of laymen to differentiate valid science from nonsense is unfortunately quite limited, and this problem doesn't magically go away when it comes to the legal system.
From a research publication by Dr MB Kovera entitled 'Legal Decisions about Scientific Evidence', "The Daubert decision highlighted several procedural safeguards that may prevent flawed research that is admitted at trial from influencing jurors' decisions. Cross-examination does not seem to increase juror sensitivity to methodological flaws (Kovera, McAuliff, & Hebert, 1999). Although opposing experts do identify flaws when they are asked to testify against an expert with flawed research (Kovera et al., 2002), opposing expert testimony about flawed methodology appears to increase juror skepticism about expert evidence rather than increasing sensitivity to methodological quality (Levett & Kovera, 2008; 2006). Opposing experts appear to activate jurors' heuristics about experts being hired guns and that competing experts indicate a lack of consensus within the scientific community. These heuristics mediate the skepticism effect."
So we see that, at least in the case of a jury, people aren't really getting at the meat of the science, they're using heuristics to see whose experts are more convincing, but most importantly, they percieve the lack of agreement as a lack of consensus within the scientific community. That's something we see quite a bit of. You see it in people who don't believe in evolution or global warming, as well as among anti-vaxers. They point out one or two quacks who happen to have PhDs, but are really on the fringe, and say there's no consensus when 99% of the scientific community is in agreement. Judges, jury members, and politicians aren't somehow inherently less likely to use heuristics and shy away from actually putting together the pieces, because they're not scientists.
To most laymen, the actual processes behind scientific discoveries and a complete understanding of their implications are more or less a black box. We kind of know what it does, but we don't really know quite how. For some people, more of the components are outside of the box, for others, less. Some people only read articles about papers, some people read abstracts, some people read full studies, check all the math, and try to reproduce it themselves. Most people aren't even touching the abstracts, let alone getting very deep into the methodology or the actual findings that they've summarized and drawn conclusions from. The fact of the matter is that most people aren't going to connect point A to point B on their own. Not most judges, not most jurors, and not most senators. We need something else.
What we need, if you ask me, are scientific advisors, elected to positions within the legal systems by the scientific community. Science isn't going to turn back the other way and become simpler, and with open mass communication the signal to noise ratio doesn't show any signs of improving. Instead of what essentially amounts to public opinion deciding, for the purpose of the legal system, what is or isn't valid science, let's have some people who are trained specifically to determine what consensus exists in the scientific community make those calls. Not to say they should be making philosophical or moral determinations, but when somebody brings up a scientific study as evidence, there ought to be someone pointing out whether or not they've got any ground to stand on.
In the mean time, the world is at the mercy of public opinion.
