The courts’ response to the potential contribution of hypnosis to the fact-finding process is illustrative of the consequences of a broader judicial desire for assistance from the mental health professions. Time and again, in their eagerness to facilitate the difficult process of adjudication, the courts have shown themselves susceptible to the unverified claims of some mental health practitioners that their peculiar insights or the techniques they employ can help the courts achieve greater certainty than has been possible before. When those claims turn out to be false, the judicial system is chagrined but apparently no more cautious about embracing the next mental health technique that promises to ease the adjudicative burden. Hypnosis, the case in point, is often traced back to the German physician Mesmer, whose seemingly miraculous cures in late18th-century France attracted wide attention among laymen and scientists alike (1). A refined version of hypnotic technique was later used by Charcot to treat hysterical conversion reactions, and some of Freud’s early attempts to probe the