230158 SE Science, Technology and ‘the Law’ (2015W)

Science has been an attractive tool for the law whenever officials want to assure their subjects of the law's impartiality and legitimacy. Conversely, the law, an authoritative institution with substantial resources and a monopoly on force, has been an attractive tool for the sciences whenever scientists have wanted to transform their knowledge claims into directive social action. In this course, we will survey the converging interests of STS scholars in law and regulation and Law & Society scholars in the role of expertise and technoscientific evidence. Law and science both grapple with balancing empirical evidence (inductive reasoning) and theoretical principles (deductive reasoning), as well as procedural >fairness< (>due process< and positivism) versus real-world relevance (pragmatism and realism). We will consider different models of how science and law work, and the ways scholars write about epistemological convergences and divergences between the two.

Throughout the course we will examine: different ideas about what makes science and law distinctive social institutions; how the two are used to regulate everyday life and settle disputes; the practice of forensics (in history and in fiction, such as >CSI<) as a special field of legal science; and the ways law and science establish (co-produce) facts about responsibility and fault (in accidents), construct value and ownership (through intellectual property), and attempt to rationalize work spaces, social behaviors and identities. Along the way we will consider: what is >the law<, what is >scientific truth<, what are they for, and what do they do?