Understanding Expectations as Techniques of Legitimation

One of the key strands of my work as a legal scholar has involved drawing upon insights from science and technology studies (STS), a broad field that brings together ideas from a range of disciplines. I use these insights to illuminate space for fresh examination of the relationships between law, science and technology, and society. My main case studies for discussion come from public health and new health technologies. In a recent special issue on ‘Law, Biomedical Technoscience and Imaginaries’ (Journal of Law and the Biosciences, co-edited with Richard Ashcroft), we argue for further law-led engagement with concepts and ideas popular in STS and cognate disciplines, such as imaginaries. The broader aim of the special issue and my own contribution to it is to stimulate law-led dialogue with STS, as well as cognate disciplines. Specifically, this dialogue seeks to widen normative and solution-oriented scholarship within STS. Although central to law, such dialogue is still rather minimal within STS. In seeking to meet this aim, our work thus takes up the call, notably from Riles, Valverde, and Cowan and Wincott, for sociolegal scholars to resituate themselves in the wider circuits of knowledge, and to become more assertive among those from other fields and disciplines who may dominate or displace them from ‘legal' terrain.