ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most productive period in the application of science and technology was the half-century from the 1850s to the 1900s. The innovations of those five decades included the light bulb, the phonograph, the telephone, the typewriter, the radio, the refrigerator, the diesel engine, and the Bessemer steelmaking process. Advances of science and technology have affected not only the substantive rules of law, but also the institutions of the legal system. The production of scientific testimony for the courtroom is bound up with cross-cutting institutional and political imperatives that complicate the notion of science as a free-standing culture, independent of the law. Although courts have succeeded, sometimes brilliantly, in bringing to the surface public fears, concerns, and demands relating to technology, their record in transmitting these messages to other deliberative arenas remains equivocal. More generally, currents in the law that have little to do with science or technology may lead to reforms.
