Romancing Forensics: Legal Failure in Forensic Science Administration

Replacing romance with realism in our picture of the law helps us to recognize problems in the legal system and design ameliorative measures. This point applies to an area of the law profoundly neglected by economists, namely, forensic science. Romanticized images of forensic science diminish our capacity to notice problems and respond to them with proposals for improvement. In the romanticized vision of television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, forensic scientists are infallible wizards. Realism, however, requires us to see forensic experts as ordinary people who respond to the same incentives as people in other areas of human action, and in the same ways. Peart and Levy (2005) call such realism “analytical egalitarianism.” Occasional bad apples notwithstanding, forensic scientists are good men and women who apply themselves diligently, often in spite of low pay and poor working conditions. They are good people, not good wizards. Because our legal system expects them to be infallible wizards, however, error rates greatly exceed readily attainable levels.