Understanding the interactions between law, technology and society writ large is a very important task for legal analysis. However, the relationship between these areas can be very complex, resulting in a complex web of interactions and feedbacks. Fortunately, Science and Technology Studies (‘STS’) offers a varied toolkit which can help us to understand how these fields overlap.

In this article, I first providing a brief primer regarding STS and its core ideas. The article then considers some high-level legal discussions (particularly those relating to the concept of technology neutral law, and of Lawrence Lessig’s four modalities of regulation) and considers how STS may help to compliment or expand upon those debates. The article then examines how STS may assist with some current legal discussions, focusing on issues that arise from certain types of automated decision-making, as governed by the GDPR, Article 22. Finally, I provide some starting points for those wishing to incorporate STS into their own work, including some of STS’s limitations for law. I conclude that STS can be a very powerful tool for legal scholars, which can help to reinforce existing approaches and to produce analyses which reflect a fuller range of legal, technical and social nuances.

In an era of global sanitary, economic and ecological crisis, beliefs in the predictive power of artificial intelligence (AI) progressively penetrate the legal and political spheres, in search of new ways to anticipate and govern the future. In this context, it is critical to understand the idiosyncratic nature of the interplay between governance and algorithmic logics of prediction. This contribution discusses how the association between governance and AI makes the future knowable in the present and shapes a programmatic way of formalising, justifying and deploying action in the here and now. We focus on three principles of institutional mobilisation in the face of uncertainty and indeterminacy: precaution, pre-emption and preparedness, each of which is affected by the use of AI relying on so-called ‘real-time predictions’. Drawing from risk theory and Science and Technology Studies, we argue that the current convergence between AI and governance is shaping a new sociotechnical imaginary, promoting a distinctive conception of life and of the future in the age of the Anthropocene.

This study draws on ethnographic and archival evidence from the Italian Archipelago of La Maddalena, offshore from the northeastern corner of Sardinia, where in 1972 the U.S. Navy installed a base for nuclear submarines. It addresses two questions: (1) How do non-experts make sense of radiological risk absent knowledge and classified information about its instantiations and consequences? (2) How do objectifications of risk change and stabilize within the same community over time? STS scholarship has emphasized the epistemic and relational dimensions of lay/expert controversies over risk assessment. Many case studies, mostly focused on the Anglo-Saxon world, have assumed lay and expert ways of knowing are incompatible due to clashing cultural identities. I use Keane's concept of “semiotic ideologies” and Peircean semiotic theory to critically reassess the validity of that assumption and examine the role of material evidence in processes of signification to explain how experts and non-experts fix, challenge, and negotiate the meanings of radiological risk in sociotechnical controversies. I critically review empirical studies and analyze ethnographic and archival data to advance a set of methodological and substantive arguments: meanings of risk change as new signs become available for interpretation; and meanings of risk are semiotically regimented: their emergence or silencing depend upon the power relations in place in a given community and organizational efforts to assemble coherent technopolitical arguments. I call this set of organizational practices “politics of coherence.”

This paper interrogates the specific workings and stakes of slow violence on Indigenous ground. It argues that despite similarities with other environmental justice struggles, Indigenous ones are fundamentally distinct because of Indigenous peoples' unique relationship to the polluted or damaged entity, to the state, and to capital. It draws from Indigenous studies, history, anthropology, geography, sensory studies, and STS, to present results from research with the Mowachaht Muchalaht First Nation, an Indigenous people on the west coast of British Columbia. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, this community used successive strategies to try to render its knowledge about health, environment, and authority visible to the settler state. Each strategy entailed particular configurations of risk, perceptibility, and uncertainty; each involved translation between epistemologies; and each implicated a distinct subject position for Indigenous peoples vis-à-vis the state. The community's initial anti-colonial, environmental justice campaign attempted to translate local, Indigenous ways of knowing into the epistemologies of environmental science and public health. After this strategy failed, community leaders launched another that leveraged the state's legal epistemology. This second strategy shifted the balance of risk and uncertainty such that state actors felt compelled to act. The community achieved victory, but at a price. Where the first strategy positioned the community as a self-determined, sovereign actor; the second positioned it as a ward of the state. This outcome illustrates the costs that modern states extract from Indigenous peoples who seek remedial action, and more generally, the mechanisms through which the colonial present is (re)produced.

Stripe rust, caused by Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici (Pst), is one of the most important diseases affecting wheat. In this study, seven gene-linked markers were used to identify the presence of stripe rust resistant genes in 51 accessions of synthetic hexaploid of wheat which were found to be resistant at seedling plant stage. Molecular marker-based gene identification showed the presence of Yr5, Yr10 and Yr15 in three accessions, Yr36 in three accessions, Yr48 in seven accessions, YrR61 in four accessions, and YrTP1 in ten accessions of resistant hexaploid of wheat. These gene-linked markers were also used for the detection of genetic diversity. A total of 68 alleles were detected by these seven gene-linked markers. The mean number of allele was 11.3 alleles per locus. Genetic diversity values ranged from 0.34 to 0.93, with highest genetic diversity value of 0.93 detected for marker Xwm477. The lowest genetic diversity value was observed for marker Xbarc167. The polymorphic information content value ranged from 0.33 to 0.92 with an average of 0.54. The highest number of alleles (n= 24) were detected for marker Xwmc477. The evidence in this study on the basis of genetic diversity and presence of Yr genes in synthetic hexaploid wheat accessions will be useful in further breeding programmes.