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Clarendon Law Lectures 2025-26 - Science, Technology, and the Constitution of Modernity
Science and technology have been recognized for more than a century as pervasive forces in modern life, profoundly shaping how we as individuals and societies understand the limits of our capacities and the horizons of what we can become. By contrast, law remains for most people the repository of the shared values and instruments with which we govern our lives. On this widely accepted account, facts and artifacts come first and norms afterwards. Whether formal or informal, law tells us how we should behave only in the light of what science makes known and how technologies enable us to act. Law therefore is seen as a follower, not a leader, and its power to make norms is often seen as lagging behind more rapid advances in science and technology.
Over the past half-century, the field of science and technology studies (STS) has demonstrated that this relationship between is and ought is largely an artifact of social thought and it profoundly misrepresents the relations between science, technology and law in modernity. Law no less than science creates the conditions within which we understand the nature of our existence and articulate the purposes of our being. This co-productionist view of law, science and technology as jointly constituting what is stable and desirable in both nature and society provides the theoretical framework for these lectures.
Date:
18 November 2025, 17:30
Venue:
St Cross Building, St Cross Road OX1 3UR
Venue Details:
The Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre
Speaker:
Professor Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard University)
Organising department:
Faculty of Law
Organiser:
Cyndy Thooi (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address:
events@law.ox.ac.uk
Host:
Professor John Armour (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Clarendon Law Lecture Series
Booking required?:
Recommended
Booking url:
https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/event/clarendon-law-lectures-2025-26-science-technology-and-constitution-modernity
Booking email:
events@law.ox.ac.uk
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Cyndy Thooi
