The relationships between knowledge, technologies, and legal processes are
central to the constitution of contemporary societies. As such, they have
come to be the focus for a range of academic projects, across interdisciplinary
legal studies and the social sciences. Legal scholars are commonly drawn to
exploring the legal developments that respond to or are shaped by scientific
innovation. The domains of medical law and ethics, intellectual property law,
environmental law and criminal law are just some of those within which the
pervasive place and ‘impact’ of technoscience is immediately apparent. At the
same time, social scientists investigating the making of technology and
expertise – in particular, scholars working within the tradition of science and
technology studies (STS) – frequently interrogate how regulation and legal
processes, and the making of knowledge and technologies, are intermingled
in complex ways that come to shape and define each other.
The interrogation of ‘law’, ‘science’, and ‘technology’ has also worked to
render problematic any notion that these are tightly bounded things always
already out there in the world, waiting patiently for analytic attention. We
might, perhaps, broadly agree on what law and technoscience look like, but
seeking to provide minute and enduring definitions only further pluralizes
their ontologies. Accordingly, we are sceptical about the possibility of definitively
specifiying the natures of knowledge, technologies, and legal processes
– even as we necessarily hold on to imaginaries of each of these in order to
work and to live.