Judicial fact-finding can demand precision that science cannot supply.

Evidence

Science could not determine the moment when those chemicals had arrived at the wells with the sort of precision Judge Skinner was demanding of the jurors. The judge was, in effect, asking the jurors to create a fiction that would in the end stand for the truth. Or, if they found themselves unable to do that, to end the case by saying they couldn’t answer the questions based on the evidence. If these questions really were necessary to a just resolution of this case, then perhaps the case was one that the judicial system was not equipped to handle. Perhaps it should never have been brought to trial in the first place. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 2258

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The procedural structure of a bifurcated trial forced jurors to fabricate the very causal facts science could not establish; a genuinely unsettling point about law’s epistemic limits.
• XREF: Connects to the catalog’s recurring theme that adversarial legal institutions manufacture facts rather than discover them (e.g. the Woburn/Civil Action material).