Courting science, binding truth: A social history of Frye v. United States

This thesis presents a social history of the most cited case in the American field of law and science---Frye v. U.S. (1923). This case set the standard of "general acceptance" for the admission of novel scientific evidence and denied admission of the Martson deception test---a lie detector test. The thesis draws from various areas of research: the history of psychology and physiology; sociology of science; critical legal history; science studies; and critical race theory---in order to reclaim and contextualize the history of Frye. Chapter 1 covers the technologies of the common law that prepared Frye for legal consumption and its subsequent seventy-year trajectory through American law. The Second Part (Ch. 2-6) re-embeds the story of Frye into the local communities from which it emerged. First, Frye is situated in the divided streets of Washington D.C. amidst the race and class struggles that heightened after the Great War and the Great Migration. Second, Marston's science is situated in the nascent fields of the New Psychology and legal psychology and located within Hugo Munsterberg's Harvard Psychological Laboratory, where his work was enlisted during the Red Scare to analyze its first black subjects. Third, it follows the case and Marston's science into the local courts where several crises in racial politics ignited simultaneously: the Red Summer of 1919; the enforcement of Jim Crow; restrictive covenants; and issues of racial identity in physical anthropology. Concurrently, the thesis tracks the triangulation of law-science-race, as Marston challenged the law's legitimacy by confronting the truth-telling technologies of the law: the judge; jury; cross-examination; and evidence law. Simultaneously, the thesis traces the instantiation of fear (racial/social/political) through multiple sites: the psychological body and mind; laboratory; courtroom and state. The thesis concludes by comparing the disparate treatment of scientific evidence in a case decided on the same day as Frye, Laney v. U.S. (1923). Accordingly, the thesis asserts that Frye was a "tradeoff" in the racial politics of the court and, in turn, notes the ease with which the court constructed scientific standards to meet its own social and political needs.