Constructing Environmental Compliance: Law, Science, and Endangered Species Conservation in California’s Delta

• In Event: 2463 - Sociology of Law

Abstract

Law and society scholarship demonstrates the crucial role of compliance professionals in the construction of law’s meaning. This article extends this literature into new terrain by conceptualizing scientists as compliance professionals in relation to environmental law. I provide a synthetic reconciliation of perspectives that present law and science as incommensurable or mutually constitutive, arguing that the visions of nature operative in scientific and legal fields can serve as the basis for several possible environmental compliance relations. The approach is developed via a thirty year historical case study of the delta smelt, a controversial and intensely studied endangered species. Three compliance relations became dominant at distinct junctures in the case’s history. First is aligned visions, a relation of coordination predicated on the construction of a boundary object between science and law. Second is judicial subordination, a relation of domination, associated with periods of acute crisis (and especially litigation), in which science serves as underlaborer to judicial reason. Third is contested visions, a relation of conflict associated with the breakdown of a constructed space of compatibility between science and law. I provide ideal typical and processual interpretations of these findings and conclude with reflections on the science-law interface in the face of environmental decline.

Author

• Caleb Richard Scoville, UC Berkeley