Plaintiff Anthony Randall (“Randall”) is an individual residing in Los Angeles, California. Randall identifies as Black. As of the time of the filing of his complaint, he was on the waiting list for a kidney transplant.
Defendant United Network for Organ Sharing (“UNOS”) is a private nonprofit organization that manages the national organ transplant waiting list. UNOS coordinates with transplant hospitals that refer patients seeking placement on the list. Defendant Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (“Cedars-Sinai”) is one of those hospitals.
Randall has designated Professor David M. Cutler as an expert witness and submitted Cutler’s expert report. Randall retained Cutler to evaluate the following questions:
“(1) Do you find to a reasonable degree of professional and scientific certainty in the field of health economics that there is a well-accepted methodology to determine how class members’ wait times, and thus changes to be offered acceptable kidneys, were impacted by Defendants’ use of the race-based coefficient? (2) If yes, what are the methodologies and what is the impact?”
However, Defendants filed a motion to exclude the expert opinions of Cutler under Rules 401, 403, and 702.
Economics Expert Witness
David Matthew Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He has earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and an A.B. from Harvard University in 1987.
Cutler has been on the faculty at Harvard for over 30 years. Moreover, Cutler’s work in health economics and public economics has earned him significant academic and public acclaim. Professor Cutler served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and has advised the Presidential campaigns of Bill Bradley, John Kerry, and Barack Obama as well as being Senior Health Care Advisor for the Obama Presidential Campaign.
Discussion by the Court
a. Under Rule 402, Randall has sufficiently shown that Cutler’s opinions are relevant and will help the trier of fact
Defendants suggested that the evidence would be irrelevant to the trier of fact because “Cutler fails to identify a single definitive measure the trier of fact should use to identify specific violations of the Unruh Civil Rights Act.” They also reasserted the argument that Cutler’s model cannot distinguish harm caused by Defendants from harm caused by a third-party actor. Even accepting those arguments as true, however, they do not establish that the evidence is irrelevant. To the extent Defendants’ arguments diminish the relevance of Cutler’s opinions, they go to the weight of the evidence—not its threshold admissibility.
b. Under Rule 702(c), Randall has sufficiently shown that Cutler’s methodology is scientifically reliable
Randall has offered, and Defendants did not seem to meaningfully dispute, that Cutler’s use of simulation modeling and partial equilibrium analyses have appeared in peer-reviewed literature and amassed acceptance among peer-reviewed economics articles and researchers in the medical industry.
Instead, Defendants argued that Cutler’s methodology is unreliable because it has “never been tested by anyone” or “admitted into evidence.” But the standard that Defendants suggested—that studies adopting a similar methodology to Cutler’s in the same field as Cutler did not support Randall’s argument because they did not “address the impact of the race-based coefficient on an offer and/or acceptance of a kidney transplant” or “apply Cutler’s unique modeling” as constructed for this case—appeared to reach beyond what Rule 702 requires. In other words, the Court need not find that someone in Cutler’s position has used this specific combination of models to resolve an identical factual question to Cutler to find that Cutler’s opinions are reliable.
c. Under Rule 702(d), Randall has sufficiently shown that Cutler’s methodology was applied reliably to the facts of this case
Defendants argued that Cutler’s methodology is premised on factually inaccurate assumptions that invalidate his approach and lead to incorrect and unreliable conclusions.
The sole premise that Defendants attacked on this basis is “the premise that a patient qualifies to be registered on the national kidney list and otherwise begins to accrue wait time as soon as he or she has an eGFR score of 20 mL/min or less.”
It did appear that Defendants have submitted some evidence that the 20 mL/min threshold did not govern every patient’s eligibility for transplant. At the hearing, Defendants argued that Randall has not actually shown that this fact is in dispute—that is, that 20 mL/min is actually the threshold at which a patient qualifies to be registered on the national kidney transplant list and otherwise begins to accrue wait time.
It appeared to the Court that Randall has failed to establish that the 20 mL/min threshold is dispositive. But this is of no moment, as it appeared that even if not dispositive, if it is significant at all—and Randall has presented evidence that it is—this would be a useful assumption for Cutler to use in his model. The fact that his model did not attempt to—and therefore cannot—account for other factors did not make his conclusions unreliable.
Held
The Court denied Defendants’ motion to exclude the expert opinions of David Cutler.
Key Takeaway
The Court’s role is to “determine the scientific validity of an expert’s principles and methodology, not to determine whether their hypothesis is correct, or to evaluate whether it is corroborated by other evidence on the record.”
So, to the extent that the parties dispute the significance of the 20 mL/min threshold, Defendants can cross-examine the witness on the reliance on what they see as a disputed or false assertion. An expert need not align with every aspect of Defendants’ interpretation of the evidentiary record to meet the Rule 702(c) threshold. To that end, the fact that Cutler’s assumptions rely upon disputed facts is a matter best resolved through cross-examination, not exclusion altogether.
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | Anthony Randall V. United Network For Organ Sharing |
| Docket Number: | 2:23cv2576 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court, California Central |
| Order Date: | February 12, 2026 |
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