The Clarendon Law Lectures 2025-26: Science, Technology and the Constitution of Modernity

The Clarendon Law Lectures will run on three consecutive days.

• Tuesday, 18th November - Lecture 1: Truth, Trust, and Expertise
• Wednesday, 19th November - Lecture 2: Time and Responsibility
• Thursday, 20th November - Lecture 3: Agency and the Human Subject

The first lecture will be followed by reception drinks and canapes at the Gulbenkian Foyer from 18:45 until 19:45.

Online link for Lecture 3: The Clarendon Law Lectures 2025-26 on 20/11/2025 (Thu)

The Clarendon Lecture Series brings leading thinkers in Law to the University of Oxford. Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University, and the 2022 recipient of the Holberg Prize.

Abstract:

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.

Lecture 1: Truth, Trust, and Expertise
This lecture foregrounds truth and trust as essential elements in making public reason. Law, science and technology all depend on a commitment to truth and facts, but each system of knowledge production acts in accordance with its own rules for establishing what counts as facticity and truth. Decades of research in STS have documented that, even in the so-called hard sciences, determining what is a fact depends on prior agreements about the applicable theoretical framework, the importance or relevance of the questions asked, and the validity of the methods used.

The opening lecture moves beyond these baseline STS observations to explore the role of law in constructing the normative framework within which it makes sense to say we have determined the facts or arrived at the truth. Beginning with the foundational distinction between fact and law, we will consider how the law deals with indeterminacy, expert conflict, and technological change. A particular focus is the notion of deference, which mediates between legal and technical authority. More generally, using analytic concepts from STS, the lecture probes the ways in which the law challenges or reinforces dominant cultural understandings of what science is and how it works.   

Lecture 2: Law, Time and Responsibility
The second lecture inquires into the relationship between temporality and responsibility in the law. It begins with the widely prevalent notion that law is incapable of keeping up with the pace of technological change and that this “law lag” entitles science and technology to take the lead in regulating themselves. Drawing on examples from regulatory law—governing the life sciences, environment, and the digital sphere—this lecture offers a countervailing narrative. Instead of lagging behind science, the law is seen to incorporate and reproduce ideas of progress that then are used to justify postures of greater or lesser deference with respect to scientific and technological advances.

At the same time, the law also operates as an agent of history. Its moving finger selects what precedents matter and which states of the world—past, present or future—most need to be defended. From abortion rights to intellectual property conflicts to children’s claims regarding climate change, law’s accordion-like capacity to collapse or distend time deserves our attention, particularly as a strategy for determining who should bear the risks and costs of technological change.

Lecture 3:  Agency and the Human Subject 
The third lecture asks how the law approaches questions of agency through boundary work around the concept of the human subject—the anchoring figure in any constitutional order. Key moments of definition have arisen in controversies involving life sciences and technologies, but the law’s role in defining who is a subject and what such subjects are entitled to from ruling institutions extends much further. In the emerging digital sphere, for example, the law confronts similar questions of what it is about human integrity that needs to be protected against intrusion and extraction. Environmental controversies, raising questions of standing, present another domain in which courts have had to grapple with questions of human rights and entitlements.

Running through these different topical areas are recurrent questions about the authority of scientific knowledge and the power of courts to craft protections or remedies when legislative guidance proves insufficient. These powers include choosing between competing legal framings of subjects, as well as explicit and tacit theorizations of personhood. The lecture considers the nature of reflexivity in the law and how closer engagement between STS and legal scholarship might enhance the capacity of both fields to pursue their respective critical and meliorative projects.

To register for these lectures please email events@law.ox.ac.uk.