Seminar: Expertise in Law and Science

Spring 2013

Professors Sheila Jasanoff and David Kennedy

Syllabus

Mondays 5:00-7:00pm (Block H)

2 classroom credits

Cross list as HKS IGA-518

How is expertise produced, disseminated, controlled and challenged? How do experts combine knowledge, common-sense, analytics, argument, lifestyle, character? How does expertise write itself into power--or submission? Through what moves does expertise become rulership? What is the work of disciplinary formations and the professions in reproducing practices of knowledge-making and professional judgment? How ought one to go about mapping the political implications of expertise, and how interpret the stakes in choosing an expert vernacular?

We will read and discuss literature from social theory, from law, and from science and technology studies which bears on these questions, alongside case studies of “expertise” in action in a variety of professional, scientific and lay settings. The seminar is open by permission of the instructors. Those interested in enrolling should address a short statement to one of the two instructors describing their interest. Cross registration by students from other University departments strongly encouraged.

Requirements: students will be expected to prepare and participate in weekly discussions and write a final essay.

Books to purchase:

David Kennedy, The Rights of Spring, Princeton Press (2009).

January 28. What is “expertise?” What is “governance?”

  • Max Weber, “The Vocation of Science” in The Essential Weber: A Reader, Sam Whimster, Editor (Routledge Press 2004) pp 270-287.
  • Max Weber, “The Vocation of Politics” in The Essential Weber: A Reader, Sam Whimster, Editor (Routledge Press 2004) pp. 257-269.
  • Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Path of the Law” from The Canon of American Legal Thought, David Kennedy and William Fisher III, Eds. (Princeton University Press 2006) pp 29-43.

February 11. Ideas and Rulership

  • Michel Foucault “Lectures of 11 January 1978, 18 January 1978, 25 January 1978 and 1 February 1978” from Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, pages 1-79. [NOTE; MAY NEED TO SHORTEN. CHECK MASTER TO ENSURE PAGE 56-57 IS NOT MISSING AND PAGE 58-59 DO NOT APPEAR TWICE AS LAST YEAR]
  • Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Ch. 2 (“Can the Mosquito Speak?”),pp. 19-53.
  • David Kennedy, “Challenging Expert Rule: The Politics of Global Governance” Sydney Journal of International Law, 5 – 28 (2005).
  • Sheila Jasanoff, “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science,” Osiris, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2006), pp. 273-292.

February 18. Language and discourse, analytic and argument

  • Annelise Riles, The Network Inside/Out (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), Ch. 3 (“Infinity Within the Brackets”), pp. 70-91.
  • Duncan Kennedy, “A Semiotics of Legal Argument,” 42 Syracuse L. Rev. 75 (1991), as republished with “European Introduction: Four Objections” in 3 Collected Courses of the Academy of European Law, Book 2, 309-365 (Kluwer, 1994) at
  • Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Ch. 8 (“On Not Hitting the Tar-Baby,”), pp. 138-154.
  • Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals”. The University of Chicago Press, Signs, Vol. 12, No. 4, Within and Without: Women, Gender, and Theory (Summer, 1987), pgs. 687-718.

February 25. Reason and argument, logic and quantification

  • John Dewey, Logical Method and the Law, 10 Cornell Law Quarterly 17-27 (1925). From Kennedy and Fisher, The Canon of American Law, pages 111-130
  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Zone Books/MIT Press, 2007),“Objectivity Shock” and “Epistemologies of the Eye,” pp. 8-53.
  • Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995),Ch. 4 (“The Political Philosophy of Quantification”), pp. 73-86.
  • Douglas Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental Law and the Search for Objectivity (New Haven: Yale University Press 2010), Ch. 6 (“Other Generations”), pp. 150-175.

March 4. System, Structure and Context

  • Pierre Bourdieu, “A World Apart” in Science of Science and Reflexivity, Translated by Richard Nice, University of Chicago Press (2004) pp. 31-55.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, “Men and Machines” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro- and Macro- Sociologies, Routledge and Kegan Paul Press (1981) pp. 305 – 316.
  • Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices” in The Logic of Practice, translated by Richard Nice(Stanford University Press, 1990) pp. 52-65.
  • Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: Economies of Worth, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) Ch. 6 (“The Six Worlds), pp. 159-211.

March 11. An Example: War

  • Errol Morris, The Fog of War – film to be screened prior to the class.
  • David Kennedy, “Lawfare and Warfare” in Cambridge Encyclopedia of International Law, (forthcoming January 2012).
  • Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), Ch. 2 (“Organizational Frames”), pp. 37-62.

March 25. Elite formations and professions

  • StevenShapinand Barry Barnes, “Head and hand: Rhetorical resources in British pedagogical writing, 1770-1850,” Oxford Review of Education, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1976), pp. 231-254.
  • Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose, “On therapeutic authority: psychoanalytical expertise under advanced liberalism,” in History of the Human Sciences(1994), Volume 7, Number 3, pp. 29- 64.
  • Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), Ch. 9 (“The Dual Organization of Molecular Biology Laboratories”), pp. 216-240.

April 1. Performance and Style

  • Amy Cohen, “Negotiation, Meet New Governance: Interests, Skills and Selves” 33:2 Law and Social Inquiry 503-562 (2008)
  • Stephen Hilgartner, Science on Stage: Expert Advice as Public Drama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), Ch. 2 (“Staging Authoritative Reports”), pp. 42-70.
  • Bruno Latour, ThePastuerization of France(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), Ch. 2 (“You Will Be Pasteurs of Microbes”), pp. 59-100.
  • Stephen Humphries, Theater of the Rule of Law, (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Prologue, pp xii.

April 8. Tacit knowledge, unconscious, unstated, common sense and nonsense

  • Clifford Geertz, "Common Sense as a Cultural System,” in Local Knowledge (New York, Basic Books, 1983), pp. 73-93.
  • Duncan Kennedy, “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850-2000” in David Trubek and Alvaro Santos, eds., The New Law and Economic Development, (Cambridge University Press, 2006) at pages 19-73. [THIS WILL NEED TO BE COPIED FROM THE BOOK IN MY OFFICE OR FROM THE LIBRARY – OR FROM DUNCAN’S WEBSITE IF HE HAS IT THERE]
  • Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ch. 6 (“Collective Tacit Knowledge and Social Cartesianism”), pp. 119-138.

April 15. Expert effects, expertise that “works,” decisions and outcomes

  • Erving Goffman, “Introduction to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” Ch. 8 in Sean P. Hier, Contemporary Sociological Thought: Themes and Theories (Toronto: Canadian Scholar’s Press, 2005), pp. 101-110.
  • Sigmund Freud, On Transference. [DAVID WILL FIND THIS TEXT]
  • Michael Lynch and David Bogen, The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), Ch. 3 (“The Ceremonial of Truth”), pp. 89-121.

April 22. Slipping the noose of expertise? Decisionism? Politics?

  • James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), Ch. 4 (“Civilization and the Unruly”), pp. 98-126.
  • David Kennedy, The Rights of Spring, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)

THIS IS LEFT OVER --- WE DIDN’T DECIDE WHERE TO PUT IT OR IF WE SHOULD ELIMINATE IT.

  • YaronEzrahi, Descent of Icarus, Ch. 5 (“The Aesthetic and Rhetoric of the Machine and Its Role as a Political Metaphor”), pp. 128-148.