Translating Science for the Courtroom: Black Boxes, Evidence, and Legal Truths

Legal systems routinely require that biodiversity decisions be “based on the best available science”, yet the interface between scientific knowledge, legal evidence, and what counts as “best” is far from straightforward or uncontested in practice. An important question for biodiversity decision-making and conservation is what happens to scientific material during legal processes.  The tensions between the sciences and law are highlighted in this paper which presents a legal practitioner's analysis of South African and international biodiversity disputes and contested administrative or pre-litigation decisions, including those relating to African penguins, baboon-human wildlife conflict, and sandeel fishing closures.

This paper explores which scientific knowledge is officially sanctioned — and what is sidelined — by legal processes, evidentiary rules, institutional expectations, and the construction of legal “truths”. Contested scientific knowledge sits uneasily with legal rules and frameworks, which require finality, with the legal procedure of administrative review preferring uncontested “facts” and the adversarial legal system positioning difference as opposition. Affidavits, comment–response documents and legal argument thus tend to translate complex scientific debates into legally recognisable “facts”, frequently along polarised lines. Diverse scientific practices are reassembled into a unitary “legal science” that can be assessed, weighed, and ordered within the frameworks available to legal reasoning, often smoothing over scientific uncertainty, disagreement, or methodological variation.

The result of these processes is that scientific knowledge becomes legally “useful” and officially sanctioned not because it is necessarily “best” according to any particular scientific measure, but because it can be accommodated by, and translated into forms acceptable to, law. It is thus argued that scientific knowledge is most readily integrated into legal and administrative processes when it is stable, uncontested, and compatible with evidentiary and procedural norms. By contrast, scientific uncertainty, trade-offs, disciplinary difference, and plural approaches challenge the law to re-form and re-create a stable scientific artefact that can support legal reasoning. The paper concludes with reflections on how scientists, lawyers, and decision-makers might better navigate the challenge of translation, without resorting to the “black boxing” of science or marginalising the shifts and variations inherent to biodiversity functioning, thereby enabling legal forums to engage meaningfully with ecological knowledge.