ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses law–science co-production in more depth, via the example of a variant DNA method known as low template DNA (LT-DNA) profiling. Using court cases and published exchanges between forensic scientists, the chapter charts the contested status of LT-DNA. It does so in order to demonstrate how disputes concerning the ontological status of forensic technology simultaneously contest the respective boundaries of scientific and legal expertise. The chapter identifies within these exchanges different modes of discursively distancing science from society at large. It is argued here that such discourses reflect the notion of deficit and surfeit models introduced in Chapter 2, together with a third discursive form, ‘social realist’, which acknowledges the impact of wider social factors on scientific claims.
