The Evidentiary Admissibility of Parental Alienation
Syndrome: Science, Law, and Policy
(Doctoral Thesis in Law by Jennifer Houlth, New York University School of Law)
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. 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. 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.
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