3 ms·

A court of law is not a court of fact.

• epgui 4y ago
  Well, in common law countries, it is the literal job of a first instance court or judge to play the role of “trier of fact”. These are however “legal facts”, and not necessarily “scientific facts” (I absolutely hate to call something a fact that is not a fact, but it is what it is: the law treats “facts” differently than science). Due to courts being very poorly equipped to deal with science, and due to rules of evidence making it very difficult to introduce science into the courtroom, court decisions are very often wrong on the science, and sometimes ignore relevant science entirely. Science in the courtroom is a pretty important and difficult problem to solve. Edit/addendum: counter-intuitively, there are also good reasons why courts will deliberately avoid getting into the weeds with science. Basically it all comes down to the fact that the court system recognizes that it is poorly equipped to deal with scientific evidence. Barriers exist to make the courts more time-efficient and also in an effort to make it harder for the court to be misled by legal advocates on either side. It’s very easy to find someone with a PhD to support either side, or to find seemingly contradictory papers to support either side, and it basically takes an expert in science to recognize a real subject matter expert… Anyway, it’s a mess of a problem.