[PODCAST] Science, Technology and the Law: In Conversation with Professor Sheila Jasanoff

‘I think the law asks questions about human experience that are quite similar to the questions that STS scholars ask about science and technology. And I think at the core of it is why do we believe the things that we do, and what authorises us or compels us ... to act in particular ways? I think that those questions can be asked just as much about science and technology as they are continually asked about law.’

Many of us scrutinise science and technology much less than we do the law. The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) directly interrogates this incongruence. An interdisciplinary field, STS sees science and technology not as existing in a vacuum, but as producing types of authorities that can be studied just as much as law. Although science and technology are often treated as higher authorities that the law must follow as it inevitably lags behind, Professor Sheila Jasanoff, the founder and director of the Harvard STS Program, rejects this characterisation.

In November 2025, she delivered the annual Oxford Clarendon Law Lecture Series, together entitled ‘Science, Technology and the Constitution of Modernity’. Chum Sdiq, a Podcast Editor of the Oxford University Undergraduate Law Journal, had the opportunity to sit down with Professor Jasanoff for an extended discussion and explore the essential relationship between STS and legal studies, considering intellectual property, artificial intelligence and the environment.

Law and STS intersect in the political sphere. In her first Clarendon lecture, Professor Jasanoff highlighted the ways in which 'the resolution of legal disputes involving science and technology draw on and affirm particular understandings of a background political order'. When interrogated about her caution against the implicit assumption that invention is necessarily aligned with the public good, Professor Jasanoff drew attention to the political theories underpinning the protection of invention. She contended that they were unsatisfactory, both for the advancement of science and technology themselves as well benefitting society at large.

Similarly, like law, the field of STS investigates the relationship between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Professor Jasanoff uses the example of climate to illustrate this idea. Although environmental concerns existed in the past, a widespread adoption of the term ‘climate’ has captured a sense of normative urgency that terms such as ‘weather’ do not encapsulate:

‘Once you displace weather — with its vagaries of changeability and day-to-day prediction — with an idea like climate, you’ve suddenly created a new state of the world. A state of the world that demands in a sense that you think differently about it, you produce different facts about it, you ask questions about climate change that you might not ask about any other kind of atmospheric phenomenon, certainly the weather. So, "how is one going to make an accord on the climate?" now suddenly becomes a normative question in the world...’

Because the term ‘climate’ defines both the state of the world and a problem requiring response, it carries a call to action: what are we going to do about our changing climate? STS, as an interdisciplinary field, is positioned to engage social institutions like law and generate an impetus for social change. Perhaps, then, as Professor Jasanoff suggests, STS may best be seen as short for ‘Science, Technology, and Society’. 

'I think that once you start seeing both science and law as effectively grand machines for producing types of authority, then the intellectual transition between ... legal studies and Science and Technology Studies becomes almost natural.'

The Spotify link to the episode is available here.

A transcript of the episode is available here.