ABSTRACT
It is not difficult to find examples of present and past disagreements between law and science. There are long-running disputes between legal and psychiatric conceptions of insanity, and volumes of research in which psychologists and statisticians criticise legal methods of proof. Disagreements between law and science may be considered from a scientific perspective, a legal perspective, or from third position. Law’s methods of fact-gathering and fact-construction will be closely connected to the adjucative process and to the problems of generating and maintaining the acceptance of those subjects to legal rules. Recent efforts to reach a meta-theory through encouraging a dialogue between law and science may be placed along a continuum. At one end, the more scientific standpoints try to show how the reflexivity of science can allow it to understand even its own limitations. At the other, more legalistic approaches try to show how law’s self-understanding, suitably encouraged, can find some place for all the relevant implications of external approaches.
