What Can Medicine Teach the Social Sciences?

In a field as slow to change as the law, it is often helpful to inject fresh perspectives from other disciplines. As different as legal analysis might be from that found in the medical and social sciences, they are all ultimately concerned with the pursuit of objectivity. Furthermore, in each of these fields, the pursuit of academic and practical goals are permeated and influenced by the values of those that seek to achieve them. Indeed, both the law and the social sciences in particular are fundamentally concerned with finding ways of distilling logic and order from the complexities of human behavior. Thus, there is much to be learned from how medicine and the social sciences reconcile these often competing goals, a comparison artfully explored by Lee McIntyre in this editorial