[superkamiguru]

Does anyone else feel like there should be a different procedure when the court isn't an expert on the fields in question that our brought up to them? I'm not even sure how to standardize that. Just that I feel like there is an issue how scientific rulings are made.

[rayiner]

Courts by necessity rule on lots of different things that they aren't experts in. If we have specialized courts for scientific issues, should we have specialized courts for accounting issues, securities issues, etc? Have you ever seen the accounting systems in a modern corporation? It can get highly technical and complicated.

Courts have experts to explain to them the legally significant aspects of different issues, and it works reasonably well.

In my experience, courts, at least federal appellate courts and the Supreme Court, don't usually get decisions wrong because they don't understand the problem domain. Instead, courts don't share the value systems of people within those fields. And that irritates practitioners on philosophical grounds.

Consider internet technology. People who work on internet technology tend to have a value system that emphasizes certain characteristics ("the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it."). But you don't have to believe in free and universal access to information, etc, to understand how TCP uses sequence numbers to create a reliable protocol out of unreliable IP.

I feel the same is true with things like gene patents. The objections do not seem to me to be based on pointing out how the Supreme Court doesn't understand this or that bit of science. The objections are philosophical: "you can't patent nature."