In the June 2007 issue of Isis, a collection of papers draws together scholarship about the intersections of science and law, exploring what happens when science enters the courtroom or the course of scientific inquiry is determined by legal outcomes. “Focus: Science and Law” is freely available to all visitors to the Chicago Journals Web site: www.journals.uchicago.edu/Isis.
“Evolving legal systems have consistently been forced to draw on (or defensibly away from) scientific knowledge, scientific methods, and scientific experts in the pursuit of truth and justice,” writes D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University) in his introduction to the Isis collection. “At the same time, courts . . . have to a significant extent shaped both the theories and the practices of knowledge production central to the emergence of modern science.”
Daniel Kevles (Yale University) contributes an essay on the history of intellectual property legislation regarding living creatures. In another piece, Allison Winter (University of Chicago) examines attempts, over the past century, to use science to improve the veracity of witness testimony.
As Burnett writes: “From intellectual property to midwifery, the neoliberal world order to sleepwalking, these essays tease out some of the complicated ways that scientific expertise has been deployed in the formal contests of social regulation and punishment.”
He continues, “The increasingly sophisticated commercialization of research science and the transformation of systems of credit and funding have meant that the courts have played more and more complex roles in scientific life: scientific fraud, priority disputes, the regulation of research on ethical and political grounds—all of these topics too offer important problems for the historian of science.”
FOCUS: SCIENCE AND LAW
D. Graham Burnett “Introduction: Cross Examination"”
Silvia De Renzi “Medical Expertise, Bodies, and the Law in Early Modern Courts”
Daniel J. Kevles “Patents, Protections, and Privileges: The Establishment of Intellectual Property in Animals and Plants”
Alison Winter “A Forensics of the Mind”
Sheila Jasanoff “Bhopal’s Trials of Knowledge and Ignorance”
Journal
Isis