ABSTRACT
It is useful as a preliminary matter to describe the approaches that scientists and lawyers take to situations involving various kinds of risk—approaches that often are in conflict but that are sometimes in harmony. A frequent line of clash between lawyers and scientists has to do with a method of problem solving that is common to scientists. Lawyers often use an adversary process to "prove" propositions, and sometimes those propositions are scientific in nature, in which case lawyers will employ scientists as "experts" for proof. Lawyers, by comparison, may not consciously think about this kind of process as often as scientists, but it is in their bones also. In a roughly parallel way, it is not at all unusual for scientists to engage in what is basically an adversary process to argue about the appropriate "factual" or "scientific" conclusions from data. There are some harmonizing elements among the professional standards and approaches of lawyers and scientists.
