Epistemic Jurisdictions: Science and Courts in Regulatory (De)Centralization

Abstract

In the 2007 case of Massachusetts v. EPA, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that one American State had the legal standing to sue a Federal administrative agency for failing to regulate carbon dioxide as an environmental pollutant. In a case challenging the scientific adequacy of Europe’s genetically modified food import restrictions, the WTO Appellate Body held against Europe on the grounds of procedural irregularity rather than scientific insufficiency, resulting in a complex compromise of national sovereignty and federal technocracy that continues to shape the European Commission’s own project of harmonization. There are currently few theoretical resources for understanding the potency of technoscience in underwriting the formation of multi-level regulatory architectures. Building on work in law and STS, this chapter considers legal cases that span local, national and international levels to develop a notion of “epistemic jurisdiction” to help capture the ways in which science, expertise, and epistemic credibility are constitutive of regulatory jurisdiction and formative of political community.