| I examine the relations between the expanding truth claims of various scientific communities and the development of the Anglo-American judicial practices of expert testimony from late 18th-century England to early 20th-century America. Moving across professional, social, and institutional boundaries from their exclusive societies and laboratories to the public courtroom, men of science quickly found their legal endeavor exceedingly frustrating. Hoping to represent in court laws that are not controlled by human whim they became instead mere tools of the lawyers and their clients in their legal battles. Quarantined in the witness box and set against each other by the lawyers, men of science found their civil procedures of generating mutual agreement unsuited for the adversarial heat of the court. The resulting spectacle of leading scientists constantly contradicting each other on the witness stand cast serious doubt on their integrity and on their science. Thus, while the volume of scientific expert testimony was constantly increasing during the 19th century, the respect paid to it by the court and the public was constantly diminishing.;The scientific community promoted the scientific method as the yardstick of demonstrable truth and portrayed the scientific man as the disinterested keeper of this truth. The growing public mistrust of scientific knowledge, and, even more, of the integrity of its practitioners, precipitated therefore an intense multi-level discourse that called into question many of the epistemological, ethical, social, professional, and educational conventions of the scientific enterprise. Still, disenchantment and mistrust between law and science kept growing. By the early 20th century, the chronic inability of the court to bridge the widening gap between experts and juries and the resultant fear of a credulous jury bewitched by scientific charlatans were enhanced by the judicial disdain of psychological experts who demanded to be heard in court on the strength of their superior knowledge of human affairs. All these factors came to play in the 1923 Frye case where the admissibility of the lie-detector was debated. In this case the American court finally replaced its traditional liberal attitude toward scientific expert testimony by an exclusionary skepticism that has dominated ever since. |
