Authors’ Response to Comments on Fitting Science Into Legal Contexts

We begin this response with an expression of gratitude to our interlocutors, professors Beecher-Monas (2014), Cheng (2014), Jewell (2014), and Smith (2014), for their insightful commentaries on our article. They approach the subject at hand from several perspectives, including the law, statistics, and sociology, but coalesce around the central concern we have identified at the intersection of law and science: The inferential gap between the questions scientists ordinarily study and the answers courts ordinarily seek. Specifically, whereas scientists research phenomena at the group or population level, and focus on the effects of causes (EoC), courts are usually interested in whether a particular case is an instance of an observed phenomenon, and in identifying the causes of effects (CoE). As Smith observes trenchantly at the start of his comment: ‘‘sociology is rarely practiced clinically’’ (p. 406)—which is something that can be said about

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