Emerging Areas of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for the Courts Proceedings of a Workshop–in Brief (2021) / Chapter Skim
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Emerging Areas of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for the Courts: Proceedings of a Workshopin Brief
Emerging Areas of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for the Courts: Proceedings of a Workshopin Brief
Pages 1-13
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The workshop was organized to explore emerging issues in science, technology, and medicine that might be the basis of new chapters in a fourth edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.2 The Reference Manual, a primary resource for federal judges on questions of science in litigation, is a joint publication of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) , the research and education arm of the federal judiciary.
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Its goal is to take knowledge gleaned from the scientific community and present it in neutral and understandable terms so that judges -- who most often are not trained in fields of science8 -- will be able to understand relevant scientific principles to support decisions that are sound in science as well as in law. The third edition of the Reference Manual, published ten years ago, updated chapters that had appeared in prior editions and added new chapters on neuroscience, exposure science, mental health, and forensic science.
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The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, for example, found "that bitemark analysis does not meet the scientific standards for foundational validity, and is far from meeting such standards. To the contrary, available scientific evidence strongly suggests that examiners cannot consistently agree on whether an injury is a human bitemark and cannot identify the source of bitemark with reasonable accuracy." See Executive Office of the President, Forensic Science in Criminal Courts: Ensuring Scientific Validity of Feature-Comparison Methods, September 2016, p.
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EMERGING ISSUES IN THE CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES Session moderator Paul Hanle (Environmental Law Institute) introduced the session by raising questions about what a reference manual on scientific evidence should say about climate science,17 what criteria should be used for selecting material to include in the manual, and what judges need to know in order to weigh evidence in cases that involve climate science.
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Using models similar to those used by epidemiologists, climate scientists are able to compare the likelihood of an event with no human changes in greenhouse gases with the likelihood of the same event with "human caused changes of greenhouse gases." Santer said that satellite temperature data show that measurements from 1979 to the present have increased and that these changes demonstrate the "warming of the lower atmosphere and cooling of the upper atmosphere." These types of measurements provide further evidence of "human effects on global climate." Santer listed potential relevant legal issues for judges to consider with regard to climate science, including when and where the hazard is likely to occur, the scientific confidence in the projected climate change hazard, the robustness of the effect across dozens of different climate models, the reliability of the attribution, and estimations of human contributions to the change. The panel's final speaker, Donald J
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Panelists and members of the workshop planning committee acknowledged the difficulty of writing a chapter on climate science and emphasized the importance of presenting arguments objectively and in a "way that is credible and respectful of the scientists and the judges." Other questions related to the idea of attribution, precision of measurement, and the likelihood of assigning responsibility for specific sources of pollution to specific companies or individuals. Panelists replied that the infrastructure to monitor CO2 and other pollutants has developed significantly -- this has led to more precise measurements in real time, and technology is accelerating to a point where such identifications may be possible.
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spoke about AI technology. He noted that, in the most recent version of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, which was published in 2011, there is no mention of AI.
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With regard to the question of "black box" algorithms, where the underlying data are either proprietary or inscrutable, Kambhampati sugggested that it is difficult to understand and characterize the relevant aggregate properties of data sets without access to underlying data, but zero knowledge proofs can be used to prove that a solution is correct absent access to the underlying data.24 Such techniques can be used to give information about data sets, while preserving the privacy of the data set. EMERGING ISSUES IN THE BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Session moderator Ellen Wright Clayton (Vanderbilt University)
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One class of these technologies are those that read information from the human brain, e.g., devices that can 25 Genome editing can be performed in both germline cells (sperm, eggs, or their precursor cells) to induce heritable genetic changes or in somatic cells (the cells of the body other than germline cells, such as skin and bones)
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Panelists noted that the underlying genetic data used to estimate the effect of genetic variants on disease risk (and in consumer genetic databases) comes predominantly from people with European ancestry, which leads to errors when applied to non-European individuals.
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Liu provided examples of how implicit biases can introduce racial biases in police stops and gendered perceptions of childcare responsibilities. Liu described studies about implicit bias in the context of employment, such as resume studies that found that individuals with white-sounding names received more positive responses than individuals with Black-sounding names, regardless of resume quality.
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Workshop planning committee member Thomas Schroeder raised a question about whether peer review was a good type of selection bias. Meng responded that peer review improves reliability; yet peer-reviewed articles can still have errors.
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Committee on Emerging Areas of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for the Courts: Identifying Chapters for a Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence -- A Workshop: THOMAS D
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