This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial. By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors engaged in negotiating the meaning, relevance, and reliability of scientific evidence, the article illustrates how the categories—law, science, and society—are inextricably interrelated in the legal negotiations and outcome. The introduction of scientific evidence into adversarial legal settings produces strategies, opinions, and claims that are not shaped solely by scientists, lawyers, or legal processes. (...) The situated law-science negotiations provide a site where social order and scientific knowledges are mutually constituted. The outcome of specific law-science interactions will be open to a range of readings and constraints that are not reducible to some putatively correct scientific understanding nor adequately described as the distortion of scientific evidence by the legal system. (shrink)

In recent decades a number of criminal convictions have been reversed on appeal, partially on the basis of problems associated with the use of scientific evidence adduced by the prosecution during the trial. These miscarriage of justice cases have received considerable attention from news media, legal commentators, criminologists and in formal public inquiries. Most responses to these cases have been critical of the scientific evidence originally relied upon at trial. Few commentators have been critical of, or even reflective about, the (...) scientific evidence used to acquit. Generally, their analyses have utilized idealized images of science and scientists. In contrast, by importing the concept of methodological symmetry from science studies, this paper aims to identify and explore the conceptual disparity (or asymmetry) between the assessment of scientific evidence used to convict and the scientific evidence used to acquit. In order to illustrate some of the limits to conventional approaches to miscarriages of justice as well as examine the judicial use of scientific evidence this will be undertaken in relation to the successful appeal of the Birmingham Six. (shrink)

This article reviews contemporary response to several contrasting strands of recent empirical work. It begins with discussing the scope and rationale of evidence law. Experimental studies on eyewitness memory and testimony illustrate the potential value of empirical studies to the practice of investigations, prosecutions, and appeals. This article discusses several lines of empirical inquiry employing diverse methodologies, experiments, surveys, and approaches and reviews their limitations, and implications and significance for the understanding and practice of law. Many of the contributions from (...) empirical legal studies are provisional and their precise value for practice is uncertain or ambiguous, but they raise important issues worthy of serious consideration. By identifying problems with eyewitness evidence and the limitations of many of the forensic sciences, and in many other ways, empirical and experimental studies have substantially outpaced legal experience. Indifference to empirical legal study is likely to reduce the social legitimacy of legal institutions. (shrink)

Over the last two decades judges (and regulators) in all common law jurisdictions have increased their reliance on published medical and scientific literature. During the same period biomedical research has undergone fundamental and unprecedented change. This article explores some of the changes to the location, organization and funding of biomedical research in order to assess their implications for liability and proof. Focusing on peer review and publication, along with reforms promoted by the editors of some of the world's pre-eminent general (...) medical journals (e.g. British Medical Journal, the Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine), this article considers how judges might respond to recent findings which suggest that corporate sponsorship systematically biases biomedical research. Given that common law judges have been reforming rules of evidence and procedure in search of impartial expertise and privileging published biomedical research, how should they respond to the strategic manipulation of the scientific record? (shrink)