UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the construction of “legal knowledge”—the finding of facts to which legal norms are to be applied in the adjudication of disputes—from an interdisciplinary perspective emphasizing epistemology, the sociology of scientific knowledge, political theory, and cognitive psychology. While the construction of legal knowledge is an essential component of the legal process and the principal task of American trial courts, the process remains fraught with practical and theoretical challenges that complicate simplistic conceptions of factfinding as a transparent process of veridical reconstruction of past events. Legal epistemic agents, like all epistemic agents, lack direct access to past events; thus, legal knowledge cannot perceive the past directly, but can only interpret it. The process of legal factfinding inevitably creates distortions and is subject to systemic biases in its effort to create a veridical construct of past events giving rise to a legal dispute.

Although this dissertation cannot address every under-explored problem concerning the legitimacy and reliability of legal knowledge construction, its principal contribution is to bring interdisciplinary insights to bear on several of the more salient unresolved problems around the law’s engagement with knowledge claims and the construction of legal knowledge through the adversarial process. The dissertation examines both practical and normative concerns regarding the construction of legal knowledge and its legitimacy as state-backed orthodoxy. It first asks whether judges’ performance as factfinders is consistent with courts’ claims of superlative judicial competence and objectivity vis-à-vis jurors. Second, the dissertation examines one area in which legal factfinders, both judges and jurors, have a notoriously poor record of reliable knowledge construction: the interpretation and application of scientific expert testimony to the resolution of legal disputes. Finally, the dissertation examines the legitimacy of legal factfinding in a liberal democratic society characterized by entrenched disagreement concerning matters of empirical fact through the lens of John Rawls’s work on political liberalism.

The dissertation concludes that legal factfinding faces myriad practical and normative challenges that defy simple solutions, but that progress can be made toward the law’s epistemic goals by applying relevant insights from the social sciences, philosophy, and political theory. It finds that three themes cut across all of the law’s epistemic difficulties—the epistemic limitations of human decision makers, the social entrenchment of empirical disagreement, and the promise and limitations of systems-based reforms to improving the veridicality of legal knowledge—and suggests further engagement with these themes as the foundation of a new research agenda applying interdisciplinary insights to problems in the construction of legal knowledge.