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A newsletter for the students, faculty and staff of the Collin County Community College District. Published monthly. For information or submissions, call 972.599.3142. Cougar News welcomes student and faculty submissions. Next deadline: March 10. All submissions are due by 5 p.m. on the due date. Photos cannot be returned. Text should be emailed to mrobinson@ccccd.edu or sent on disk. Please submit copy that is proofed, edited and saved in Word format. Cougar News staff: Lisa Vasquez, director; Mark Robinson, editor; Marcy Cadena-Smith, contributor; Dana Schmitz, contributor; Sydney Portilla-Diggs, student correspondent; Stephanie Hall, student correspondent; Nick Young, special contributor, photography and layout.
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A conversation with ...
David Faigman is a distinguished professor of law at the University of California Hastings College of Law, and he visited Collin to speak about religion, science and American law in February.
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| David Faigman | In your opinion, how are law and science similar?
I think they are similar in that they are both foundational institutions of society. They share the desire to say what the perfect world looks like; what is reality? To some extent institutionally at least they both share a concern about values and ethics. What kind of research you are going to do on stem cells is obviously a great interest to science and law. They have a lot of overlapping interests and a lot of overlapping concerns, but they are institutionally measuring their success on very different factors.
What are potential problems you see in the use of science that would change the way we view law?
The biggest problem is that the legal professionals are not very sophisticated about science. One danger is that they will simply accept whatever scientists say as true or not true without having an independent understanding of the problem and the methodologies they use to come up with those scientific challenges. One of the great challenges and one of the things I’ve spent a good deal of my time on is trying to convince the law that they have to spend a significant amount of time learning about the basics of science. They should understand the scientific culture. They should understand basic research methods. They should understand basic statistics and probability theory. That’s a hard one to win on because many people go to law school because they don’t have a great deal of aptitude in science and math. A lot of them haven’t had math or science since high school, and they shy away from what they are not good at. If they get straight A’s in English, they go to law school; if you get straight A’s in chemistry, you go to medical school or become an engineer. That’ll be a great challenge and institutionally the law will have to figure out because there are so many technical scientific problems like global warming to toxic waste clean up to stem cells to abortion to prescription drug approval. There are so many areas that require more than elementary understanding of science. The law will either get up to speed about it or start making bad decisions out of ignorance.
What do you think of the Innocence Project?
I’m good friends with Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld (the project's founders), so I have to be nice to them. I think generally they are doing incredibly good things. An important thing about uncovering the false convictions through DNA and DNA exonerations is you are doing a lot of good things. You’re finding those who have been falsely convicted and have spent a great deal of time in prison for no reason. That’s unjust, unfair and outrageous.
It also tells us something about the evidence that they were convicted on, and I think we have to do a better job collecting that evidence. Cases involving arson rely on very bad arson-type technology, or a lot of cases are eye-witness identification cases, where we have known for a long time and psychologists have been telling us that eye witness identifications are less reliable than many people might think. DNA exonerations are certainly demonstrating that to be so. Let's go back to the arson example, in forensic science. A recent New York case that discovered where someone had been convicted on bite mark evidence. Bite mark evidence is not particularly a good type of forensic science, yet it comes into the courts. Using bad forensic science whether it’s arson or bite marks leads to two problems: It convicts an innocent person, and it also means we haven’t convicted the guilty person and the person is out there committing more crimes.
So I think the Innocence Project is not only doing good things in the liberal sense of identifying people who have been unjustly convicted, but I think it is doing great work in the conservative sense in identifying ways to put away murderers and rapists because we should improve our technology and forensic science in other areas.
You clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Austin. What was that experience like?
Oh, I loved it. It’s a great experience. You have a real bird’s eye view of the law. It’s a federal appellate court, so the cases are coming up from the district courts and habeas petitions, and you see a wide variety of civil and criminal cases. It’s probably the best introduction to a career in a law that one could imagine after law school. Judge Thomas Reavley is a most outstanding human being, a gentleman, scholar and mentor to me. It was a real formative experience in my growing up as a lawyer and an academic.
Is there a subject that you would like to write about that you haven’t already?
My most recent book “Laboratory of Justice” has a chapter on religion, but it’s not an area I have really focused on, but I do think in some sense it does present the third leg of this particular tripod of law, science and, now, religion. So I’ll say in the future I would like to write more on the First Amendment and religion clauses and how they are extremely relevant to not only First Amendment cases but constitutional cases, generally.
If you hadn’t taken this career path, what would you be doing?
The easy answer to that is psychology. I went to graduate school in psychology. So I’d probably be a psychologist, and if I were successful I would be a neuro-physiologist; I’d be interested in studying the brain, the behavioral aspects of the brain. I’d still be an academic. I’m a die-hard academic. If I wasn’t an academic, what would I be doing? I’d want to be a baseball player but I can’t hit the curveball. So an unsuccessful baseball player.
At what point did you decide being a scholar is what you wanted to be?
Three professors in college -- in fact I dedicated my first book to them (Richard Izzett, Virginia Pratt and Thomas Judd [all faculty at State University of New York, College at Oswego, where Faigman attended as an undergraduate] inspired me. They all believed in me and inspired me in my sophomore and junior year of college.
In high school I was much more interested in playing sports. Whatever they saw in my writing and thinking, they took me under their wing. They introduced me to what it meant to be a professor. I thought it was a great job to be a student the rest of your life. They were really warm, kind people who took ideas very seriously, and I would have to say they started me on that path. One other person at graduate school and law school, a professor named John Cunningham [faculty at the University of Virginia], who is still a close friend of mine, has been my most important influence today regarding law and science. So I’d have to say the teachers and professors of my life once I got to college inspired me towards this path.
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| David Faigman spent time talking with students and faculty during his visit to Collin. |
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