Preface: Recognizing Implicit Bias in the Scientific & Legal Communities

Abstract

[Introduction] Several years ago, in the Fall 2018 volume of Dædalus, we wrote “Bridging the Science-Law Divide,” an essay about the work of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's Committee on Science, Technology, and Law. In that essay, we discussed the importance of having the legal and scientific communities engage with each other on a host of issues, and highlighted work that the committee conducted on the courts' handling of scientific evidence and on society's governance of emerging technologies. We mentioned that, in the coming years, the committee hoped to focus on the issue of implicit bias (referred to as “unconscious bias” in our 2018 essay), as it was becoming increasingly evident that factors outside individual awareness were affecting personal and institutional decision-making that hindered the full participation of all our citizens.

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