"Law" and "Policy" in Science, Technology, & Human Values

Cite as:

Woodruff, Maggie. 2018. ""Law" and "Policy" in Science, Technology & Human Values." In Science, Technology, & Human Values (ST&HV), edited by Alberto Morales Ramirez and Aalok Khandekar. In STS Across Borders Digital Exhibit, edited by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. http://stsinfrastructures.org/content/law-and-policy-science-technology-...

1990's

1990. Fiorino. "Citizen Participation and Environmental Risk: A Survey of Institutional Mechanisms"

"Standard approaches to defining and evaluating environmental risk tend to reflect technocratic rather than democratic values. One consequence is that institutional mechanisms for achieving citizen participation in risk decisions rarely are studied or evaluated. This article presents a...Read more

1992. Frankenfeld. "Technological Citizenship: A Normative Framework for Risk Studies"

"This article introduces the concept of technological citizenship (TC) as a status for individuals consisting of rights and obligations within bounded technological polities enforced by statist structures. The model reconciles freedom to innovate with the affirmation of the autonomy and...Read more

1993. Laird. "Participatory Analysis, Democracy, and Technological Decision Making"

"Scientific and technological policy issues are not and should not be exempt from the norms of democratic governance. This article examines two major theories of democracy, analyzes their commonalities and differences, and derives criteria for evaluating various forms of public...Read more

1994. Ruscio. "Policy Cultures: The Case of Science Policy in the United States"

"Throughout its history, the relationship between government and science in the United States has been mutually beneficial but also contentious. This article reviews the recent history of this relationship and attributes the conflict to different norms and values in each of the...Read more

1995. Epstein. "The Construction of Lay Expertise: AIDS Activism and the Forging of Credibility in the Reform of Clinical Trials"

"In an unusual instance of lay participation in biomedical research, U.S. AIDS treatment activists have constituted themselves as credible participants in the process of knowledge construction, thereby bringing about changes in the epistemic practices of biomedical research. This...Read more

1995. Kaplan. "The Computer Prescription: Medical Computing, Public Policy, and Views of History"

"This article traces past trends and current developments in medical computing in the United States. It suggests a link between shifts in emphases in medical computing and in federal government policy toward health care delivery. The development of medical computing was not driven...Read more

1996. Shackley and Wynne. "Representing Uncertainty in Global Climate Change Science and Policy: Boundary-Ordering Devices and Authority"

"This article argues that, in public and policy contexts, the ways in which many scientists talk about uncertainty in simulations of future climate change not only facilitates communications and cooperation between scientific and policy communities but also affects the perceived...Read more

1996. Solomon and Hackett. "Setting Boundaries between Science and Law: Lessons from Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc."

"In Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court made its first major pronouncement on the evaluation of scientific evidence, calling on judges to act as gatekeepers for scientific knowledge and validity, despite lack of scientific training among judges. Daubert...Read more

Contributors

2000's

2000. Herrick and Sarewitz. "Ex Post Evaluation: A More Effective Role for Scientific Assessments in Environmental Policy"

"Unreasonable expectations about the nature and character of scientific knowledge support the widespread political assumption that predictive scientific assessments are a necessary precursor to environmental decision making. All too often, the practical outcome of this assumption is...Read more

2001. Edmond. "The Law-Set: The Legal-Scientific Production of Medical Propriety"

"This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial (in Victorian England). By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors (the law-set, a derivation of the core-set) engaged in negotiating the meaning,...Read more

2001. Guston. "Boundary Organizations in Environmental Policy and Science: An Introduction"

"Scholarship in the social studies of science has argued convincingly that what demarcates science from nonscience is not some set of essential or transcendent characteristics or methods but rather an array of contingent circumstances and strategic behavior known as “boundary work” (...Read more

2001. Miller. "Hybrid Management: Boundary Organizations, Science Policy, and Environmental Governance in the Climate Regime"

"The theory of boundary organizations was developed to address an important group of institutions in American society neglected by scholarship in science studies and political science. The long-term stability of scientific and political institutions in the United States has enabled a...Read more

2003. Kelly. "Public Bioethics and Publics: Consensus, Boundaries, and Participation in Biomedical Science Policy"

"Public bioethics bodies are used internationally as institutions with the declared aims of facilitating societal debate and providing policy advice in certain areas of scientific inquiry raising questions of values and legitimate science. In the United States, bioethical experts in...Read more

2004. Dunsby. "Measuring Environmental Health Risks: The Negotiation of a Public Right-to-Know Law"

"Quantitative health risk assessment is a procedure for estimating the likelihood that exposure to environmental contaminants will produce certain adverse health effects, most commonly cancer. One instance of its use has been a California air toxics public “right-to-know” law. This...Read more

2005. Lahsen. "Technocracy, Democracy, and U.S. Climate Politics: The Need for Demarcations"

"Ulrich Beck and other theorists of reflexive modernization are allies in the general project to reduce technocracy and elitism by rendering decision making more democratic and robust. However, this study of U.S. climate politics reveals complexities and obstacles to the sort of...Read more

2007. Nowotny. "How Many Policy Rooms are There? Evidence-Based and Other Kinds of Science Policies"

"In my response to Andrew Webster’s examples I point to certain limitations, while fully supporting the thrust of his argument for a re-engagement of science and technology studies (STS) with policy making. When analyzing the policy implications of knowledge, the larger context must be...Read more

2010's

2010. Bora. "Technoscientific Normativity and the 'Iron Cage' of Law"

"Participation of a broad variety of actors in decision-making processes has become an important issue in science and technology policy. Many authors claim the involvement of stakeholders and of the general public to be a core condition for legitimate and sustainable decision making. In...Read more

2010. Kropp and Wagner. "Knowledge on Stage: Scientific Policy Advice"

"The paper provides a deeper insight into institutionally given opportunities for and limitations to reflexive, dialogue-centered, and risk-sensitive knowledge exchange between scientific experts and agro-political decision makers, especially under the conditions of a significant degree...Read more

2012. Ormerod and Scott. "Drinking Wastewater: Public Trust in Potable Reuse"

"In the coming decades, highly treated wastewater, known as reclaimed water, is slated to be a major element of municipal water supplies. In particular, planners propose supplementing drinking water with reclaimed water as a sustainable solution to the growing challenge of urban water...Read more

2013. McAndrews. "Road Safety as a Shared Responsibility and a Public Problem in Swedish Road Safety Policy"

"Sweden’s road safety policy, Vision Zero, seeks to eliminate deaths and serious injuries from traffic crashes, and it recognizes that the bottleneck in improving road safety is displacing mobility as the main priority of the road transportation system. This analysis considers the...Read more

2014. Berman. "Not Just Neoliberalism: Economization in US Science and Technology Policy"

"Recent scholarship in science, technology, and society has emphasized the neoliberal character of science today. This article draws on the history of US science and technology (S&T) policy to argue against thinking of recent changes in science as fundamentally neoliberal, and for...Read more

2015. Tidwell and Smith. "Morals, Materials, and Technoscience: The Energy Security Imaginary in the United States"

"This article advances recent scholarship on energy security by arguing that the concept is best understood as a sociotechnical imaginary, a collective vision for a ‘‘good society’’ realized through technoscientific-oriented policies. Focusing on the 1952 Resources for Freedom report,...Read more

2016. Hinterberger. "Regulating Estrangement: Human–Animal Chimeras in Postgenomic Biology"

"Why do laws and regulations marking boundaries between humans and other animals proliferate amid widespread proclamations of the waning of the species concept and the consensus that life is a continuum? Here I consider a recent spate of new guidelines and regulations in the United...Read more

2017. Damjanov. "Of Defunct Satellites and Other Space Debris: Media Waste in the Orbital Commons"

"Defunct satellites and other technological waste are increasingly occupying Earth’s orbital space, a region designated as one of the global commons. These dilapidated technologies that were commissioned to sustain the production and exchange of data, information, and images are an...Read more

2017. Wilke. "Seeing and Unmaking Civilians in Afghanistan: Visual Technologies and Contested Professional Visions"

"While the distinction between civilians and combatants is fundamental to international law, it is contested and complicated in practice. How do North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officers see civilians in Afghanistan? Focusing on 2009 air strike in Kunduz, this article argues...Read more

2018. Jasanoff and Metzler. "Borderlands of Life: IVF Embryos and the Law in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany"

"Human embryos produced in labs since the 1970s have generated layers of uncertainty for law and policy: ontological, moral, and administrative. Ontologically, these lab-made entities fall into a gray zone between life and not-yet-life. Should in vitro embryos be treated as inanimate...Read more

2017. Vaisman. "The Human, Human Rights, and DNA Identity Tests"

"This special issue examines the diverse realities created by the intersection of emerging technologies, new scientific knowledge, and the human being. It engages with two key questions: how is the human being shaped and constructed in new ways through advances in science and technology...Read more