Understanding Failed Forensic Science: A Research-Based Radio Documentary Series

This project enhances scholarly and public understandings of how technical scientific knowledge shapes legal outcomes, especially through the process of finding facts. Fact determination is an unregulated yet enormously consequential task for courts. Yet the law of evidence remains widely conceptualized as an essentially rule-bound domain, including in legal pedagogy. Meanwhile, despite judicial efforts at gatekeeping for reliable science, forensic expertise continues to feature in miscarriages of justice. By accessibly highlighting underappreciated stories of expert evidence gone wrong, this project will address critical gaps between legal theory and practice, enrich the research literature with interdisciplinarity, and foster academic progress with vital practical applications. This project also aims to enrich public discourse surrounding these issues in Canada and abroad. To date, little research about how experts and technical scientific knowledge shape the law’s key processes has been effectively mobilized to the public. Our project seeks to reverse this trend by partnering the intern’s disciplinary expertise with Cited Media’s acclaimed knowledge mobilization framework to produce a five-part radio mini-series that will enhance the public’s understanding of critical yet often misunderstood legal processes

Faculty Supervisor:

Emma Cunliffe

Student:

Roland Nadler

Partner:

Discipline:

Law

Sector:

Information and cultural industries

University:

University of British Columbia

Program: