Clarendon Law Lectures 2025/26: Part 1 - Truth Trust and Expertise

Описание: The Clarendon Lecture Series brings leading thinkers in Law to the University of Oxford. Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University, and the 2022 recipient of the Holberg Prize.


Lecture series abstract:

Science and technology have been recognized for more than a century as pervasive forces in modern life, profoundly shaping how we as individuals and societies understand the limits of our capacities and the horizons of what we can become. By contrast, law remains for most people the repository of the shared values and instruments with which we govern our lives. On this widely accepted account, facts and artifacts come first and norms afterwards. Whether formal or informal, law tells us how we should behave only in the light of what science makes known and how technologies enable us to act. Law therefore is seen as a follower, not a leader, and its power to make norms is often seen as lagging behind more rapid advances in science and technology.

Over the past half-century, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated that this relationship between is and ought is largely an artifact of social thought and it profoundly misrepresents the relations between science, technology and law in modernity. Law no less than science creates the conditions within which we understand the nature of our existence and articulate the purposes of our being. This co-productionist view of law, science and technology as jointly constituting what is stable and desirable in both nature and society provides the theoretical framework for these lectures.


Lecture 1: Truth, Trust, and Expertise

This lecture foregrounds truth and trust as essential elements in making public reason. Law, science and technology all depend on a commitment to truth and facts, but each system of knowledge production acts in accordance with its own rules for establishing what counts as facticity and truth. Decades of research in STS have documented that, even in the so-called hard sciences, determining what is a fact depends on prior agreements about the applicable theoretical framework, the importance or relevance of the questions asked, and the validity of the methods used.