An Accurate Diagnosis , But Is There a Cure ? : An Appreciation of The Role of Science in

Professor Robin Feldman has written a splendid and wise book on a timely and important topic: The role of science in law. The usual complaint about the relation of law and science is that the law insufficiently attends to and incorporates scientific discoveries, but Professor Feldman turns this criticism upside down. Instead, her central thesis is that the law defers to science far too much either by cloaking legal criteria in scientific terms, thus avoiding hard and indeed intractable problems, or by deferring to scientific experts essentially to decide difficult cases. She terms these the “internalization” and “externalization” strategies. These are serious problems, according to RSL, because the law has an inevitably independent domain that addresses normative questions that science cannot resolve. Moreover, most of the legal “action” will take place in the interstices between criteria, and science will not be helpful to legal evolution in those gaps. Science can surely help legal decision makers resolve legal problems, but science cannot resolve them for the law. In sum, legal abdication to science is fueled by a misguided hope of evading or solving difficult normative issues, but such false hopes cannot be realized and will interfere with sound legal judgment and policy. To support her thesis, Professor Feldman offers both a descriptive and a normative account of the law/science relation and