Workshop: Environmental Science in the Context of Court Decisions as a Critical Mode of Informal Science Education

George Washington University, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a two-day workshop to promote collaborative engagements between scientists and legal scholars to bring about more effective communication of science within judicial contexts. The workshop will bring together legal scholars, social scientists, climatologists, and key leaders from the energy, investor, and insurances communities to build a research network that effectively communicates and connects science to be used in court decisions. The basis of this workshop is the understanding that the court system is a rarely acknowledged, yet critical, realm of informal science education and policy-making. Many scientific fields including climatology, economics, forensics, and the health sciences have often affected decisions in the courts. This workshop will catalyze a research network of legal-scientific exchange that will serve to transform how science is developed for and used in legal settings. It will also advance the consideration of distinct stakeholder needs and agendas in their diverse engagement with conjointly legal and scientific issues. This workshop promises critical broader impacts to the scientific, legal, energy, investor and insurance communities, as well as to the public understanding of science and of its role in policy development. This workshop aims to catalyze collaborations across legal, scientific, and business groups to advance work in the court system and in science, and to further informal science learning. The workshop will include a series of discussions that brings together scholars across different disciplines with the intent of building collaborations and further opportunities for engagement after the workshop. There will be four workshop sessions, including presentations and discussions. One session focuses on legal and scientific collaborations to date including consideration of the scope of such collaborations, the science that has been used, the advances made, and the challenges encountered. Another session focuses on the emerging science of extreme event attribution, a relatively young field of research that seeks to quantitatively assess the change in risk of individual extremes events (i.e., heat waves, drought, floods). It will include a discussion of the diverse methods, tools, and language used by scientists in order to build a foundation for cross-disciplinary engagement. A third focuses on legal frameworks and approaches used to address climate change litigation. The fourth focuses on post-workshop group activities including the development of plans for implementation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.