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Mediators and Moderators of Normative Reductionism: Towards a Testimonial Approach to Expertise in Legal Inquiry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Suryapratim Roy*
Affiliation:
School of Law, Trinity College Dublin

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in making legal decision-making and scholarship scientific or inter-disciplinary, without there being any interrogation of how or why this should be done. This has resulted in polarised views of the importance of science on one hand, and the primacy of democracy on the other. Such polarisation is not helpful primarily because both ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ remain unintelligible to those who do not have access to the particular epistemology that supports their usage. In this article, I seek to reconceptualise the conflict between democracy and science as the association of legal decision-makers and scholars with expert inquiry. I further conceptualise such association as a process that involves normative reductionism of testimonial exchange. Despite a claim to ‘a culture of justification’ in legal systems such as the European Union, the process of normative reductionism is essentially arbitrary. I seek to articulate a framework where this process may be approached in a disciplined manner, concentrating on the role of mediation and moderation of expert knowledge.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016

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66 Hence Lopes: ”…the sheer weight of all the wrong answers tends to deform the basic conclusion, bending it away from an evaluatively neutral description of process and toward something more like ‘people use heuristics to judge probabilities and they are wrong’ or even ‘people make mistakes when they judge probabilities because they use heuristics.’” Lopes, supra note 65, at 73. This may indicate why scholars such as Vernon Smith who conduct economic experiments that manipulate the conditions till participants reach rational behaviour are at odds with the methodology employed by Kahneman and Tversky. For an overview of such conflicts, see generally FLORIS HEUKELOM, supra, note 67.

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68 Thus, knowledge about human behaviour is integrally linked to the way such knowledge is presented. This line of reasoning – though not directed at psychological experiments – motivates Bruno Latour's work on the sociology of science, including the way economics as a discipline shapes itself.

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97 Id. at 3.

98 See Susan Haack, Credulity and Circumspection, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2015.

99 Jennifer Lackey, ‘Testimonial Knowledge’ in Routledge Companion to Epistemology, 316 (Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard eds. 2010).

100 Integral to this question is determining the scope of what constitutes testimony, as against a mere utterance. The law of evidence clearly has a preference for the performative view of testimony; the distinction between hearsay and direct evidence found in evidence law ‘lacks any agreed-upon vocabulary for discussing or regulating the use of expert documentation.’ Karen Petroski, supra note 52, at 83.

101 Queensland Conservation Council Inc. v Xstrata Coal Queensland Pty Ltd & Others [2007] QCA 338. The Queensland Court of Appeals found a Tribunal in breach of natural justice as it relied on its own materials regarding climate science that were not submitted in evidence.

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103 Cass R. Sunstein, From Technocrat to Democrat, Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 14-10(2014).

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109 Id.

110 Id.

111 Id. at 1679.

112 Brewer, however, is not unaware of the conceptual difficulties surrounding a ‘two-hat solution’. He queries: ‘What kind of training should the experts – or expertly trained judges – get?’ And he hints at the possibility of intra-disciplinary conflicts: “Will scientific discipline become so specialised that it ceases to make sense to talk about general epistemic competence even within a discipline?” Id, at 1679.

113 Roy, supra note 71.

114 Habermas, for instance, argues that in democratic decisionmaking epistemic authority requires communication between stakeholders, where ‘private experiences’ pass on to the ‘public practices’ of a collective. Jürgen Habermas, Truth and Justification 134 (2003). For a review of the engagement of others theorists, see Teubner, supra note 88.

115 See Susan Haack, supra note 98.

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118 For an account of how testimonial studies could inform responsibility for climate change action despite climate scepticism, see Lorraine Code, ‘Doubt and Denial: Epistemic Responsibility Meets Climate Change Scepticism’ (2013) Onati Socio-Legal Series 3.5.

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131 In relation to legal analysis, I use the term ‘modify’ in a different manner than that understood in statistical analysis, where moderation effects are studied in relation to strengthening or changing the direction of the relationship between the other variables. As Miller, Judd and Yzerbyt explain, “Mediational analyses attempt to identify the intermediary process that leads from the manipulated independent variable to the outcome or dependent variable. The issue of moderation focuses on factors that influence the strength and/or direction of the relation between the treatment variable and the dependent variable. Moderational analyses attempt to identify individual difference or contextual variables that strengthen and/or change the direction of the relationship between the treatment variable and the independent variable.” Muller, Dominique, Judd, Charles M. and Yzerbyt, Vincent Y., When Moderation is Mediated and Mediation is Moderated 89:6 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 852, at 852 – 853 (2005)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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137 Antje Brock, ‘The Environment in the Capabilities Approach: Why and how its constitutive role for capabilities matters’, paper presented at the 2014 Human Development and Capability Association Conference, Athens, August 2014.

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141 Roy, supra note 33.

142 See for instance See James Huffman, Global Warming goes to Court, available at: http://www.hoover.org/research/global-warming-goes-court.

143 Stichting Urgenda v. Government of the Netherlands (Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment), ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:7145, Rechtbank Den Haag, C/09/456689 / HA ZA 13-1396 (Urgenda).

145 For a review of the arguments, see Roy and Woerdman, supra note 121.

146 For a debate on whether some rights are absolute in the European legal order, see Tsakyrakis, Stavros, Proportionality – An assault on human rights? 7 International Journal of Constitutional Law 1 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khosla, Madhav, Proportionality an Assault on Human Rights?: A Reply 8 International Journal of Constitutional Law 298 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tsakyrakis, Stavros, ‘Proportionality an Assault on Human Rights?: A Rejoinder to Madhav Khosla8 International Journal of Constitutional Law 307 (2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

147 Stichting Urgenda v. Government of the Netherlands, para 4.49.

148 “Barroso Defends EU's Climate Strategy”, Ends Europe Daily, Issue 2399, Oct. 2, 2007, available at: http://www.endseuropedaily.com/articles/index.cfm (last visited May 28, 2015).

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150 See the discussion in Section III.1.

151 Case T-16/04 Arcelor v. European Parliament and Council of the European Union [2010] ECR II-211, para 175.

152 Case T-16/04, para 168.