Laboratory of Justice
The Supreme Court's 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law
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Publisher Description
From the American Revolution to the genetic revolution, to race and abortion rights, legal expert David L. Faigman’s Laboratory of Justice examines the U.S. Supreme Court’s uneasy attempts to weave science into the Constitution.
Suppose that scientists identify a gene that predicts that a person is likely to commit a serious crime. Laws are then passed making genetic tests mandatory, and anyone displaying the gene is sent to a treatment facility. Would the laws be constitutional?
In this illuminating history, Laboratory of Justice: The Supreme Court’s 200-Year Struggle to Integrate Science and the Law, legal scholar David L. Faigman reveals the tension between the conservative nature of the law and the swift evolution of scientific knowledge. The Supreme Court works by precedent, embedding the science of an earlier time into our laws. In the nineteenth century, biology helped settle the “race question” in the famous Dred Scott case; not until a century later would cutting-edge sociological data end segregation with Brown v. Board of Education. In 1973, Roe v. Wade set a standard for the viability of a fetus that modern medicine could render obsolete. And how does the Fourth Amendment apply in a world filled with high-tech surveillance devices?
To ensure our liberties, Faigman argues, the Court must embrace science, turning to the lab as well as to precedent.
“Faigman takes the Supreme Court to task for persistently failing to inquire into the merits of the scientific evidence in the cases before it.”—Daniel J. Kevles, Legal Affairs
“Faigman is one attorney who hasn’t shied away from insisting that judges stay up to speed with scientific knowledge.”—The Christian Science Monitor
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Faigman, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, examines the intersection of law and science in the constitutional rulings of the Supreme Court. For Faigman, the Constitution is a charter defining rights and obligations in broad terms, but the charter remains open to new interpretations as conditions change. Science certainly changes over time, and where legal decisions are based on science, they too must adapt as new science emerges and outmoded theories are discarded. Faigman shows how this evolutionary process occurs, detailing, for example, how 19th-century beliefs about racial hierarchies (the 1857 Dred Scott decision) gave way to a revised racial theory under which separate but equal public facilities were approved (in Plessy, 1892). A later generation of social scientists demonstrated how separate schools profoundly harmed black school children, and that data supported a new constitutional result in Brown v. Board of Education. Still more recent social science comes before the Court regularly in its affirmative action cases. In addition to science bearing on race, the author considers many other points at which science has influenced constitutional law, including theories of eugenics once advanced to justify compulsory sterilization, and the biology of gestation underlying Roe v. Wade. Throughout, Faigman traces the growing receptivity of the Court to empirical data and also shows how unsystematic, even haphazard, the process is for placing such facts before the Court. This insightful and accessible study throws light on how new ways of understanding the world produce new readings of our Constitution.
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