In this symposium hosted by the Texas Law Review, top science and law scholars will meet in the search for cross-cutting themes emerging at the intersection of science and law, with particular focus on issues arising in criminal justice, bioethics, and the environment.
To facilitate the bridging of topics and the search for larger themes, presenters will address one or more of the following questions in their remarks:
- Substance. There are often battles of the experts (or more accurately, disagreements or variation in views within a relevant scientific community of experts) with respect to relevant scientific information that informs a policy or legal question. Disputes among experts occurs at many levels: within the science community, in legislation drafting, in regulatory procedures, in the courts, and in other institutions confronting uncertain or disputed science. What standards are and should be used to resolve these battles when non-scientists in the legislative, regulatory, or judicial process confront them?
- Who Decides. Who decides which experts’ views should prevail in a legal or policy setting? Do legal and policy institutions effectively determine the outcomes by how they frame questions, set the ground rules, and then adjudicate the outcome? Or are there opportunities for experts to engage or preside over the process even within legal and policy settings? More generally, what are the rules for deciding who decides and are there battles at this stage as well?
- Implementation and Management of Scientific Knowledge. After battles over substance and process have concluded, how does the legal or policy system ensure that it has implemented the agreed-upon scientific position reliably? And, since science is a set of propositions changing over time, what happens when the battle lines among experts shift in important ways, leading to a new understanding or perspective among the scientific community on the reliability/implications of scientific information that informs a policy or legal question? How does the legal and policy system adapt to new knowledge that may undermine the basis for previous decisions?
Papers will be published in the 2015 symposium issue of the Texas Law Review.