Mediators and Moderators of Normative Reductionism: Towards a Testimonial Approach to Expertise in Legal Inquiry

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in making legal decision-making and scholarship scientific or inter-disciplinary, without there being any interrogation of how or why this should be done. This has resulted in polarised views of the importance of science on one hand, and the primacy of democracy on the other. Such polarisation is not helpful primarily because both ‘science’ and ‘democracy’ remain unintelligible to those who do not have access to the particular epistemology that supports their usage. In this article, I seek to reconceptualise the conflict between democracy and science as the association of legal decision-makers and scholars with expert inquiry. I further conceptualise such association as a process that involves normative reductionism of testimonial exchange. Despite a claim to ‘a culture of justification’ in legal systems such as the European Union, the process of normative reductionism is essentially arbitrary. I seek to articulate a framework where this process may be approached in a disciplined manner, concentrating on the role of mediation and moderation of expert knowledge.