What’s Law got to do with Good Science?
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919834173 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Dialogue and Debate |
Dialogue and Debate
What’s Law got to do with
Good Science?
Ilke Turkmendag
Newcastle University, UK
Marie Fox
Liverpool University, UK
Charis Thompson
London School of Economics, UK
The
´re
`se Murphy
Queen’s University Belfast, UK
Introduction
Neither law and medicine, nor law and science, sit in easy partnership. We generally
imagine them as having radically different priorities and practices: law, it is said, prizes
argument, trades in competing claims and works towards what ought to be, whereas
medicine and science value accuracy and seek truth, and give priority to facts. Law is
also widely seen as illiterate when it comes to matters medical or scientific. There are
regular complaints that courts operate outside of their competence when handling such
matters; they are seen as poor performers when it comes to gauging when and in what
ways deference to medical and scientific expertise is, or is not, due. Relatedly, law has
been accused of demoralising medicine, and the so-called ‘law lag’ – namely, law’s
inability to keep up with science and technology – is widely seen as unfortunate but
unavoidable. There is also a sense that when law turns its attention to medicine, science
and technology, it tends to obsess about limits, whether outright prohibitions or simply
moratoria and ‘red tape’ obstructions. The picture, in short, is not a happy one, especially
Corresponding author:
Marie Fox, School of Law and Social Justice, Liverpool University, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK.
Email: marie.fox@liverpool.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(3) 392–413
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663919834173
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for law: amidst strong popular desire for caring medicine and responsible research and
innovation – for processes, institutions and actors that will articulate, procure and sustain
what we as societies want from medicine, science and technology – law and lawyers are
deemed to dawdle, or to deter the wrong things, in the wrong ways and at the wrong
times.
Some, however, see it differently, and our debate and dialogue takes its lead from
them. As a general rule, this different way of thinking is characterised by curiosity about
discrete but parallel bodies of research on the relationships between science and tech-
nology and other authoritative social institutions, including the law. In legal circles, it
has recently attracted enough interest to be described as an emergent legal field; here, by
way of convenient shorthand, we’ll call this field ‘law and science’.
As a field, law and science engages openly and actively with regulation scholarship.
Interestingly, it is also open to science and technology studies (STS), its far better-
established, cross-disciplinary counterpart which has its own detailed accounts of the
relationships between science, technology and the law (e.g. Felt et al., 2017). To date,
law and science has been dominated by engagements with topics and themes concerning
criminal justice, evidence, reproduction and parenthood , medicine, the environment,
information technology and intellectual property (e.g. Harrington, 2017; Pottage,
2011; Reece, 1998). More and more, however, it seems interested in deeper and broader
engagement – and in particular, in conceptual questions concerning the partnerships,
actual and potential, between law and science. In places, these questions focus on how
science should be handled in legal settings (Jasanoff, 2015) or on forming subfields such
as ‘law, regulation and technology’ (Brownsword and Goodwin, 2012; Brownsword
et al., 2017). Elsewhere, the emphasis is on drawing out the ubiquity of connections
between law and science (Faulkner et al., 2012), how science and law are ‘co-produced’
(building on Jasanoff, 2004) and the importance of ‘social studies of law’ (Cloatre and
Pickersgill, 2014).
In this debate and dialogue, we seek to contribute to these conversations about this
new field of law and science. Specifically, we seek to build on the idea that deeper and
broader engagement between STS and sociolegal scholarship, and between these and
other separate but parallel fields analysing science, technology and law, is to be wel-
comed. Our jumping-off point is Charis Thompson’s Good Science, a book that flags
ethics rather than law as its point of departure – the work is self-described as an ‘ethical
choreography’. Thompson’s earlier ground-breaking scholarship in social studies of
science has proven to be a valuable resource for legal scholars. In particular, her ethno-
graphy of assisted reproduction (Thompson, 2005) which tracked the complex dynamics
of science, kinship, gender, economics, law and other matters at play in what she termed
the ‘ontological choreography’ of the ART clinic has informed legal approaches to and
understandings of the governance of reproduction. In Good Science, she builds on her
conclusion concerning the implications of her Assisted Reproductive Technologies
(ART) study for future relations between science and society, focusing this time on the
geopolitics and biopolitics of stem cell research. As Thompson notes, stem cell research
was the ‘object of more interdisciplinary ethical debate and labor than is typical of
advances in science and technology’ (2013: 5) and she contends that such ethical atten-
tion is essential to the progress of ‘good science’. Our pieces engage with this ethical
Turkmendag et al. 393
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