DR.

RAM MANOHAR LOHIYA NATIONAL LAW

UNIVERSITY, LUCKNOW
SESSION- 2021- 2022
Law science and Technology

PROJECT
ON

Relationship between law science and technology

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF: SUBMITTED BY:

DR. Shashank Shekhar Ayush Pratap Singh

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR B.A. LL.B (HONS.)
DR. RMLNLU, SEMESTER- IXTH
LUCKNOW ENROLMENT NO. 170101042
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I want to express uncommon much obliged and appreciation to my educator Dr. Shashank
Shekhar who gave me chance to finalize this research subject.

This project helped me pick up a major viewpoint about the Project Topic. All through the
exploration period, I have been guided by my educator at whatever point I confronted any
obstacles or was in a state of daze not having the capacity to resolve the intricacies of the
subject.

I want to thank my University, Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University, Lucknow,
for giving me the opportunity to be a part of a novel exploration turned educational program
which without a doubt helps the comprehension of the subject.

I likewise want to thank my guardians, guides and well-wishers who have been a consistent
underpin and have sufficient energy and again looked into my work and have given
their experiences on the matter.

Ayush Pratap Singh

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
• RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY AND LAW
• EFFECTS OF SCIENCE ON TECHNOLOGY AND LAW
• EFFECTS OF LAW AND SCIENCE ON TECHNOLOGY
• DIVISION OF THE FIELD INTO THREE PRIMARY STANDARDS
• THE CRITICAL ROLE PLAYED BY LAW IN MANAGING THE
IMPACTS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
• CONTROLLING RISK OF MODERN SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY
• BENEFITS OF NEW TECGNOLOGY
• ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF TECHNOLOGY
• LEGAL VS SCIENTIFIC STANDARDS
• NEW TECHNOLOGIES VS OLD LAWS
• CHALLENGES FACED BY LAW IN THE FIELD OF SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
Introduction
Men have risen above the animal level, very largely by means "technics", the use of tools and
implements for better procuring the mate means of life. Similarly, when they have achieved a
reasonably perfect lei system, they have risen on the intellectual plane. A legal system is
intended represent a synthesis of conflicting interests. Knowledge of the material world; its
purest form is science, and when put to practical use, it becomes technology. Wisdom, at the
peak of its excellence. is the foundation of the ideal political system, and, when utilised to
regulate human relationships, becomes law Herbert Spencer defined Science as organised
knowledge.1 Law could be described as the wisdom of organised society given expression in
binding rule by the State. "Law is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good
order", Aristotle‟s saying2 possesses as much validity today as when he wrote

Law plays an essential part in the regulation of science and technology and concerning the
ethical consequences of scientific research along with modern technologies. This field of law,
science, and technology attempts to study systematically the diverse ways in which law interacts
with science and technology. It has been defined as “the discipline that deals with how our legal
system can and must adjust to accommodate the problems created by the ever more urgent and
ubiquitous impact of technology on society.”
With the growth of the internet, technology, genomics, telecommunications, etc. legal scholars
and law schools emphasized on the intersection of the law with science and technology. The
United States Supreme Court Justice, Stephen Breyer stated, “scientific issues now permeate the
law.” There has been immense growth in the study of law, science, and technology interactions
including the incorporation of the subject in the syllabus, courses, journals, conferences, etc.
Apart from this, there has been a growing awareness of the importance of scientific and
technological developments amongst legal scholars and practitioners.
The field of law, science, and technology is premised on the belief that "science is a distinctive
institution worthy3 of distinctive treatment by lawyers" . Despite increased awareness that
science and technology present unique issues for the law, different formulations exist for

1
Herbert Spencer Education Chapter 2
2
Aristotle, Politics, Book 7, Ch. 4, S.5.
3
Arkfeld, Michael R. (2001). The Digital Practice of Law, 5th edition. Phoenix, AZ: Law Partner Publishing.
examining law, science, and technology interactions. Here the field is divided into three primary
strands. The first concerns the role of the law in managing the impacts of science and
technology, including controlling the risks, promoting the benefits, and addressing ethical
implications. The second concerns the institutions of law and science, examining how law affects
the practice of scientific research, as well as the reciprocal relationship of how science and
technology influence the law. The third involves a more generic inquiry into the problems and
tensions that arise from the intersection of law with science and technology.

Relationship between science, technology, and law

Law and science have a complicated relationship. Science is the systematic approach that builds
and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Law, on the other hand, refers to the system of rules which have been laid down by the social
institutions to regulate the actions of members and it may enforce such behaviour by the
imposition of penalties. However, with the growth of scientific and technological advances, law,
and science, the two disciplines became interdependent on each other. The legislature of various
nations has laid down numerous laws to manage the impacts of science and technology on
society. For example, in the era of the internet, the legislature has laid down laws and provisions
which deal with cybercrimes. Law seeks to curb the impacts of science and technology which
revolve around aspects such as risks, benefits, and ethical implications.

The judicial system also seeks to provide remedies to the aggrieved party that has been wronged
due to the 4harmful implications of scientific and technological developments. Science on the flip
side has aided the legal system with modern technologies such as polygraph tests, collection of
evidence in a scientific manner, electronic recordings which can be used as evidence before the
court, etc. Science also helps in the court proceedings with the admission of evidence, autopsy
reports, etc. Therefore science and law are codependent on each other despite being two different
disciplines in modern society with the advances in science and technology.

4
Beecher-Monas, Erica. (2000). "The Heuristics of Intellectual Due Process: A Primer for Triers
of Science." New York University Law Review
Effects of science and technology on law

• Science and technology have substantive as well as the procedural effect on the law. On
the substantive side, new scientific evidence and methodology can change the course of
legal claims and their outcomes, i.e. forensic science has opened new avenues in criminal
law while creating a myriad of legal, ethical, and social issues.

• And on the procedural aspect of the law, it lays down how DNA samples should be
collected and stored, how genetic information may be used, when are convicted criminals
allowed to reopen their cases, etc.
• In the early twenty-first century, digital evidence has improved the quality and
availability of trial evidence while raising concerns about tampering and fabricating
digital pieces of evidence. This led to a massive change in the law

Effects of law on science and technology

Law affects science and technology, individuals who have been aggrieved by scientific
misconduct tries to seek judicial remedies. Advocates have even served non-party subpoenas on
scientists who are doing research potentially pertinent to the lawsuit.

This exposes the scientists to intrusive searches and they often have to disclose before the court
about their research activities. Legislature also subjects scientists to new legal requirements, for
example when any scientific project is based on government funding then it is important to take
required legal steps to ensure absolute protection of the scientists and the general public. In 2000,
the United States Congress enacted the Data Quality Act which imposes a series of substantive
and procedural requirements on scientific methodology. These developments indicate a trend of
growing legal intrusion on science and technology.
Division of the field into three primary standards

Despite the growing interests and awareness that states science and technology present a unique
angle of law; different5 formulations exist for examining the law, science, and technology. There
exist three primary standards of the division of the field.

• The first concerns the role of the law in managing the impacts of science and technology
which includes controlling the risks, promoting the benefits, and addressing ethical
implications.

• Secondly, the institutions of law and science examine how the law affects the practice of
scientific research as well as the reciprocal relationship that determines how science and
technology influence the law.
• The third standard involves a more general inquiry into the problems and tensions which
emerge from the intersection of law with science and technology.

The critical role played by law in managing the impacts of

science and technology

Law plays a crucial role in managing the impacts of science and technology on society. Law
seeks to curb the impacts of science and technology which revolve around aspects such as risks,
benefits, and ethical implications.

5
Black, Bert; Francisco J. Ayala; and Carol Saffran-Brinks. (1994). "Science and the Law in the Wake of Daubert:
A New Search for Scientific Knowledge.
Controlling risks of modern scientific technologies

The law is the principal societal institution for controlling these risks through the legislature and
the judiciary. Risk regulation involves two key aspects of scientific and legal interaction. Firstly,
the part played by law in regulating risks from science and technology and secondly, the use of
science by law to assess risk from new and existing technologies. The parliament of different
nations tries to reduce risk before it imposes a greater threat to society. Most industrialized
nations have comprehensive statutory or regulatory programmes which try to reduce potential
risks from technologies such as industrial chemicals, pesticides, natural resource extraction,
pharmaceutical, etc. These legislations predict potential harms and attempts to curb that.

Apart from major legislations law also tries to prevent risks through litigation and liability.
Individuals who have been injured by technologies may bring tort or product liability lawsuits
seeking compensation and science, on the other hand, plays the critical role of providing
evidence of such cases.

In a leading case of Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.6 it was stated by the court
that federal courts are required to perform a gatekeeping function to affirm that scientific
testimony is relevant and reliable before it can be admitted. This judgment has involved judges
being proactive and knowledgeable in screening prospective scientific testimony and has also
stimulated scientific organizations to seek and educate judges and also provide experts to aid in
the proceedings which involve science and technology.

The legal system has instituted a number of procedural and substantive innovations in an attempt
to enhance the scientific merits and credibility of its decisions. One major change has been a
systematic shift of decision-making authority from juries to judges, presumably because judges
have greater capability and experience in distinguishing valid from invalid scientific testimony

6 supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/509/579/
Benefits of new technologies
The law also plays an essential role in the development of innovation and promoting
technologies through legal doctrines and mechanisms. The most important aspect relates to
intellectual property, by which the law gives the investors and creators a time-limited exclusive
right to commercially exploit the output of the work of their workers. The main objective of
protecting intellectual property is to promote innovation, by giving researchers, and authors
economic incentives which will aid them to create new inventions and works. New technologies
cause fundamental challenges to traditional doctrines.

For example, digital information might not be adequately protected by old traditional laws and it
requires the copyright owner to bring a lawsuit alleging infringement. Because unlimited copies
can be made by simply uploading material on the internet and thereafter, legislatures and courts
have extended more copyright protection for digital data.

There also exist challenges in adapting patent law to genetic discoveries. Patenting genes have
raised numerous scientific, legal, ethical, and practical complexities that established patent law is
not equipped to address. Such as the traditional distinction between non-patentable products and
patentable inventions and discoveries has been dimmed by technology.

Ethical implications of technology

The law also seeks to resolve the ethical implications of technology on the society which arise
due to modern inventions. Society heavily relies on legislatures and courts to develop and apply
appropriate legal principles. The law attempts to resolve moral issues in a socially acceptable
manner. In various cases, courts have considered their authority while giving a decision in ethical
aspects of controversial technological developments. Even when courts exclude ethical
considerations they often remain the primary reason for litigation which is fought before the
court in socio-legal grounds.

Scholars make a distinction between “science" and “technology". All sciences developed out of
“technics"; mathematics developed from measuring goods in the market, keeping accounts and
surveying land; astronomy, from compiling the calendar; mechanics, from working wood, stone
and metals, and from construction of buildings and transportation by land and water, chemistry,
from smelting metallic ores, brewing, distilling and dyeing; biology, from hunting and
agriculture; and so on. But no technical achievement, however great, has by itself produced
genuine science. Genuine science was the work of the Greeks of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C.
(Thales and his school, the Pythagoreans and their successors). They first released human
thought from the “pursuit of utility on the one side and fantasy on the other, in order to make a
systematic attempt to understand the natural world. Their most conspicuous success was in
mathematics, as a result of generalising problems and discovering methods of proof. Others, in
Egypt and Mesopotamia, had discovered particular solutions for particular problems, some quite
difficult, -presumably by trial and error; but they could not distinguish an exact from an
approximate solution, nor even be sure that an apparent solution was not a lucky accident. The
Greeks could do these things, and, by solving a general problem, solved at one stroke a multitude
of particular problems.
Legal v. scientific standards

A heated debate topic in the field of law, science, and technology states whether the law should
apply scientific standards and methods of proof, or apply its standards to scientific evidence. An
example is the concept of statistical significance, where the standard scientific convention is that
a result will be considered statistically significant if the probability of the result being observed
by chance alone is less than five percent. Legal experts argue that law should apply a more
lenient standard in cases of civil litigation where the standard of proof is predominant of the
evidence.

However, it is essential for the court to understand scientific methodologies while deciding on
cases that involve science and technology. In the case, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals,
Inc., the United States Supreme Court held that courts must guarantee that scientific testimony
must have grounding methods of science and procedures which have derived from scientific
methods.

Where, then, do we find the peculiar impact of science on law in modern times? In answer to this
query, it may be stated that the peculiarity lies in this-that the points of contact between science
and the law have, in modern times, increased in their number and intensity. Each year brings a
fresh crop of scientific discoveries. Knowledge that was accumulated a decade ago becomes out
of date. Fresh fields are trodden, fresh avenues explored, fresh phenomena unearthed every year.
These discoveries and explorations increase not only in quantity and number; they touch
individual and social life at so many points. These are the points that ultimately become the
points of contact between science and the law. It is in this manner that scientific developments
result in an increase in the need of legal response to the various points of contact. A country
would be able to deal with this situation satisfactory to the extent to which its legal machinery
that is to say, the machinery concerned with the formulation, administration, interpretation and
re-formulation of the law,- takes adequate steps wherein the legal response referred to above
finds Its reflection in a satisfactory manner . Certain scientific techniques could be abused. Need
to protect indlvidua1 liberty against unwarranted interference with privacy, which is technically
possible, is an example of the need to create legal protection against abuse of technology. It may
be elementary, but it is worth pointing out that the law acts only on human beings, and is
concerned only with the conduct of human beings. It is not therefore every scientific
development that may create legal problems. For example, the purely scientific discoveries have
been revolutionary - discovery of X-Ray (Roentgen 1895), psycho-analysis (Freud 1900),
Mendelism (1900), radium (Curie 1903). But these did not rise any socio-legal problems. On the
other hand, disintegration of the atom (Lord Rutherford 1919) had important consequences in the
course of time.

New technologies v. old laws

Another issue on this aspect is whether new technologies require new legal frameworks or
whether they can work within the ambit of old laws. This could be answered by the incorporation
of eminent legislation in the legal framework of the society which addresses issues on the
internet such as privacy, copyright, etc. These issues also arise in other technological contexts.
Existing laws have generally been applied in the United States, while new enactments have been
promulgated in Europe and other jurisdictions.

One of the examples; is patent law, where to date existing rules have been applied even in the
case of new technologies in genes and other biomedical discoveries.
Some of the legal luminaries have argued that new laws, in particular new approaches that move
away from the one-size-fits-all approach of current law, are needed to provide optimal patent
protection for certain new and emerging technologies.
Challenges faced by law in the field of science and
technology

In modern society, science and technology are developing rapidly. One of the examples of such
development is Moore’s Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on microchips will
double every two years. The law, on the contrary, is less dynamic in nature as it has to go
through a technical statutory process in order to keep up with the scientific developments.
Statutes can easily become outdated and case laws are also slow to adapt to the scientific and
technological developments due to the binding effect of past precedents. Therefore, it results in
the law being based on outdated scientific assumptions or fails to adapt to recent scientific and
technological knowledge. It is essential for the law to adapt to advancing science and technology
and incorporate adaptive legal regimes to keep up with science and technology
Another issue is whether new technologies require new laws or can be addressed by existing
legal frameworks. One colorful articulation of this issue is the debate about whether there is any
more need for the law of cyberspace than for the law of the horse (Easterbrook 1996, Lessig
1999). The analogy refers to the fact that there were no major legal doctrinal changes introduced
to address the horse as it became a major7 part of commerce in earlier times, but rather existing
doctrines were applied to the horse with only minor modifications. Thus there is a question about
the need for new legal doctrines to address the Internet on issues such as privacy, copyright,
pornography, and gambling. The passage of specialized laws such as the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act and the Child8 Online Protection Act (1998) indicate a pattern of adopting new
laws to address at least some cyberspace issues.
The same general issue arises in other technological contexts. One major debate in the regulation
of genetically modified organisms is whether such products should be governed by existing

7
Callahan, Daniel. (1996). "Escaping from Legalism: Is It Possible?" Hastings Center Report 26, no. 6

8
Burk, Dan L., and Mark A. Lemley. (2002). "Is Patent Law Technology-Specific?" Berkeley Technology Law Jou

.
environmental and food safety laws, or alternatively whether a new statutory regime created
specifically for biotechnology products is required (Marchant 1988). Existing laws have
generally been applied in the United States, while new enactments have been promulgated in
Europe and other jurisdictions.
Conclusion

Law and science are codependent on each other despite being different disciplines. Law interacts
with science and technology on different levels and diverse ways. These interactions proliferate
in the future with advancing technologies that present risks, benefits, and ethical implications on
society. The field of law, science, and technology attempt to bridge the gap between these two
fields of study and also tries to tackle the challenges faced by law, science, and technology. It
also seeks to provide a systematic treatment of the actions and problems that would eventually
help these subjects evolve in parallel and at pace with subject matter.

The law interacts with science and technology in diverse ways. These interactions will proliferate
in the future with advancing technologies that present novel risk, benefit, and ethical scenarios.
The nascent legal field of law, science, and technology seeks to provide a systematic treatment of
these actions, and will grow and evolve in parallel and apace with its subject matter.

It is a legitimate task of the law to consider the social merits and demerits of scientific or other
development and regulate human conduct. Knowledge makes us free, but it can also be a danger
for man. After all, it was the serpent that caused man to eat from the apple of knowledge and
forego paradise. We cannot, however, reverse the progress of knowledge. We can only deal with
the risk created by abuse of knowledge. It is the task of the law to guide and shape the world, and
to deal with the dynamics of technical developments and their effect on human beings. When
Newton bound together in one dazzling synthesis the great and the little, the stars in their courses
and the fall of an apple, a thankful generation, at once scientific and pious, could exclaim with its
spokesman,
Pope: “Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be: and all was light:
Bibliography

REFERENCES

https://blog.ipleaders.in/relationship-law-science-technology-modern-society

https://legalmetry.com

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/science-
technology-and-laW

Knowledge technology and law by Emilie cloatre