Research

While the interaction of law, science and technology is often portrayed as a one-sided asymmetrical relationship in which the law is continually struggling to keep pace with advances in science and technology, one of the lessons that history shows is that the relationship is much more complex and interdependent than is often thought. Techno-science has not only consistently provided potential new candidates for protection and regulation, it has also played an important role in allowing the law to deal with and accommodate that new subject matter.

While science and technology do not provide answers to the normative question of whether the new subject should be protected or regulated and if so to what extent, the law has consistently looked to science and technology to provide the means to allow the law to describe, demarcate, and identify that new subject matter. One of the key aims of the UQ Law, Science and Technology Program is to explore the nature of this relationship. Combining ethnographic, historical and doctrinal approaches along with insights from the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), researchers are looking at a diverse range of questions from what constitutes evidence in forensic science and how regulatory science interacts with legislative regimes and judicial practice through to explorations of the myriad bioethical issues related to pharmaceutical and medical research and the patenting of biological, genetic, and agricultural materials.