Page - 175 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

of social communications, to accept their versions of reality in preference to those of the more prevalent.’1 Thus, central to law’s reconstruction of the social world is the way in which law (re)constructs people – including ‘expert’ forensic scientists – ‘as semantic artifacts of the legal system’, in ways which reflect existing power relationships and enhance the self-reproductive potential of the legal sub-system. The reconstruction of forensic expertise is central to this process, and is achieved through shaping of the processes, and contextual factors, which govern the production of forensic-scientific knowledge. These aspects of forensic knowledge production will form the subject of the final chapter in this section. Conclusions Those discourses which explore the boundaries of the legal system tend to focus on the potential for interdisciplinary communication to diminish barriers and to enhance the mutual understanding of unrelated disciplines. Such approaches are frequently encountered in discussions relating to the consumption of scientific truth claims by the criminal justice system. The UK Ministry of Justice, for example, speaks of the need to move beyond a ‘so-called system which operates in silos’ towards an effective multi-agency partnership. Similar statements can be found in jurisdictions across the globe. However, from an autopoietic perspective, these impulses to reconcile the truth claims of agents from competing disciplines – each grounded in its own epistemological traditions – may be misplaced and deserve closer analysis. This study uses Teubner’s theory of legal autopoiesis to explore cross-boundary relations between the legal and scientific sub-systems. It derives from research into the introduction of Streamlined Forensic Reporting in England and Wales (a non-expert form of forensic reporting which restricts DNA reports to a ‘match’ or ‘non-match’). This new form of inter-disciplinary communication provides opportunities to explore the ways in which certain non-legal discourses are deemed capable of reproduction within the legal sub-system, whilst others are disqualified. The study disseminates research results, which demonstrate that, in accordance with autopoietic theory, it is for the legal sub-system to impart normative meanings onto those messages. Further, that meaning depends on context. And that context is drawn from the set of possible messages from which the resonant input is selected. Thus, inferences with regard to the meaning and context of forensic knowledge imparted by Streamlined Reports must be shaped through a reductive process, which constrains the set of possible messages from which the content of the report is selected. The study thereby demonstrates that the SFR scheme provides the legal system with a means to reformulate and reconstruct forensic discourse, at the point at which that discourse threatened to import a penumbra of ‘unhelpful’ meanings and difficult contextual choices. 1 Ibid. 175