Preface xi
U.S. Supreme Court cases in environmental law indicate—e.g., the case of
Massachusetts v. EPA where the state sued EPA for failing to regulate carbon as
a “pollutant”—the work of environmental law, whether in litigation or compli-
ance, often deals with challenges to the technical basis and process of regulatory
rulemaking. In the U.S., rulemaking pursuant to environmental or health statutes
must conform with an overarching law, the Administrative Procedures Act of
1946, which sets out a conception of due process in the regulatory state. This law,
then, sits as a kind of constitution of regulatory power as among agency offi cials,
experts, citizens, and the Federal courts, all of which are given certain powers to
scrutinize the legitimacy of agency decisions. As Jasanoff explains in her intro-
duction, the system affords legal standing to citizens to challenge regulations, and
thus—in the U.S. system—courts have become an important place for the public
legitimization of science. Laws of evidence and epistemic procedure, as well as
the operation of judicial review and scrutiny, construct both public knowledge and
the power to know. This theatre of actors and normative concerns is refl ected in
Jasanoff’s core interests in regulation, public evidence and the law.
Science and Public Reason moves beyond judging, courtroom evidence, and
regulatory law to directly confront legal theory, which is characteristic of some of
Jasanoff’s most recent work. This is well represented and captured in the essay
“In a Constitutional Moment,” the fi nal piece in the volume. Invoking both STS
and legal concepts, she analyzes the signifi cant sociopolitical and technological
transitions wrought by globalization in constitutional terms, drawing our attention
to problems of citizenship, markets and global knowledge. Her essay pushes legal
theory to be more constructivist and STS theory to be more cognizant of the law.
Constitutional moments bring us directly to the idea of public reason itself, the
overarching conception for the volume, and the subject of its introductory essay.
As Jasanoff conceives it, public reason is one response to the problem of trust in
the “risk society”, our current age of technological uncertainty, information
excess, and proliferating expertise. Although governmental systems can and do
take recourse to blanket denials or pure technical reason in the face of calls for
accountability, they also provide public proofs of various kinds. Public reason
then consists of “institutional practices, discourses, techniques and instruments
through which modern governments claim legitimacy in an era of limitless risks—
physical, political and moral.” Structures of public reason are part of the larger
architecture of political life and help constitute the bargain between citizens and
their governing institutions. They also entail particular models of citizen reason
and agency, public and private. In Science and Public Reason , Jasanoff illumi-
nates a facet of political life that was omnipresent but somehow invisible.
The political stakes, therefore, of public reason are huge. It conditions forms of
citizen subjectivity, imaginaries of the State, and possible routes of political engage-
ment. The volume then is a script for scholarship and action. In an age of political
guile and slick punditry—captured brilliantly by comedian Stephen Colbert’s
notion of “truthiness”—attending to public reason is a fi rst step towards debating,
reconstructing, and practicing norms of accountability. It may also be a path
towards ensuring that public decision-making utilizes our best knowledge, not the