No Magic Wand

David S. Caudill is a professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He is the author of Property: Cases, Documents, and Lawyering Strategies (2004).Lewis H. LaRue is also a professor of law at Washington & Lee University School of Law. He is the author of Constitutional Law as Fiction: Narrative in the Rhetoric of Authority (1995).

Legal actors' understanding of how scientific knowledge is produced is a matter of immense and increasing importance in contemporary society. Caudill and LaRue make a significant contribution to this debate by drawing on science studies research as a prophylactic against the temptation to adopt idealized or "romantic," as they call them, images of scientific activity. No Magic Wand demonstrates that bringing a science studies perspective to bear on legal problems leads, not to meaningless relativism, but to a profoundly pragmatic approach to assessing the value of knowledge claims that invoke the mantle of science.

• Chapter 1 IntroductionChapter 2 1. What's the Problem?Chapter 3 2. On Judges Who Are Too StrictChapter 4 3. On Judges Who Are Too GullibleChapter 5 4. The Idealizations of Legal ScholarsChapter 6 5. Science is a Pragmatic ActivityChapter 7 6. Science Studies for Law