Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America.

• Author: Salinas, Christopher
• Position: Book Review

Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America. By Tal Golan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; pp. viii + 325. $49.95 cloth.

It would be difficult to imagine our court system absent the use of scientific evidence. Undoubtedly, the use of forensic science has not only become commonplace in the courtroom itself, but in popular depictions of trial advocacy. Nary does a night go by on network television without a portrayal of the scientific method proving the guilt of one criminal or another. The relationship between science and law, however, is not always a comfortable one. The courts place a premium on testimony and argument. Science eschews individual eyewitness testimony for empirical observation and data collection. The history of expert witness testimony in courts provides a context for our understanding of the relationship between law and science. Tal Golan's Laws of Men and Laws of Nature is an important historical examination of scientific expert testimony in Common Law courts. Golan accomplishes this through an examination of the relationship between the institution of law and the institution of science. Both law and science are interested in uncovering truth: one through scientific method, the other through an adversarial legal system. Scientific expert witnesses represent an intersection of the two institutions. Unfortunately, their long relationship has gone largely ignored by historians of each field respectively. Golan argues that "there is relatively little scholarship about the history of the relations between the two most authoritative institutions in modern Western culture--science and law" (1). Through an examination of expert witnesses, Golan argues that the legal system has aided in the development of science as much as science has refined judicial processes. The relationship between science and law frames the entire book: "The result should be read not as a history of English patent law or American forensic science but as an exploration of key moments in the evolving relations between the expanding cultures of law and science on both sides of the Atlantic" (2).

Laws of Men and Laws of Nature begins in late-eighteenth-century England with the birth of the expert witness. In a detailed analysis of the Wells Harbor case, Golan examines the introduction of Newtonian science as more than just opinion into a Common Law court. The point of this initial chapter is...