This Essay explores two historical events—the exposure of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon #5) to nuclear fallout from a U.S. thermonuclear bomb test in the Pacific Ocean and the contamination of the Cumbrian Fells in the United Kingdom as a result of the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl disaster— to better understand what, if anything, can the history of technoscientific advising in policymaking contexts teach scholars about technical expertise in policymaking today? The Essay then teases out three lessons. First, expertise in political contexts is never unmediated, meaning that technical expertise should be understood as filtered through social, political economic, and other kinds of biases. Second, informational technologies are multifaceted sociotechnical systems such that giving one form of expertise a privilege over decision-making is a recipe for skewed policymaking. Third, sociotechnical systems operating in the physical world are subject to acute and irresolvable indeterminacies that make the kind of reduction to numbers preferred by technical expertise inappropriate. Sociolegal scholars working in law and technology should consider these lessons in context.
