ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses a fundamental problem in the relationship between law and the social sciences. It describes three ways of understanding disagreements between law and social science and suggests how these approaches offer clues to explaining why law may have only a limited concern for truth. Trial pathology approach focuses on the alleged malfunctioning of the institutions and processes of adversarial systems. Competing institutions approach envisages law and science as powerful and often rival institutions or “expert spaces.” Incompatible discourses approach is particularly associated with the autopoietic theories of Luhmann and Teubner, though it can be formulated in a variety of other ways and draw on different strands of contemporary social and legal theory. The main point which should have emerged from the chapter is that we do not have to think of social science only as handmaiden to a scientistic style of social policy.