Borderline science: expert testimony and the Red River boundary dispute
| Autor: | Eugene Cittadino |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2004 |
| Předmět: |
History
Government Geography media_common.quotation_subject Geology Oklahoma History 20th Century Dissent and Disputes Texas Boundary (real estate) United States Supreme court Negotiation History and Philosophy of Science Rivers Law Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous) Humans Geographer Treaty Policy Making Social psychology media_common |
| Zdroj: | Isis; an international review devoted to the history of science and its cultural influences. 95(2) |
| ISSN: | 0021-1753 |
| Popis: | The 1918 discovery of oil in the bed of the Red River, which forms the border between Texas and Oklahoma, led to a U.S. Supreme Court case that involved the extensive use of expert witnesses in fields such as geology, geography, and ecology. What began as a dispute between the two states soon became a multisided controversy involving those states, the federal government, Native Americans, and individual placer-mining claimants. After the federal attorneys introduced scientific experts into the dispute, including the plant ecologist Henry Chandler Cowles and the geographer Isaiah Bowman, fresh from negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference, Texas attorneys fielded their own team of opposing experts. Charged with the task of determining the location of the border, defined as the south bank of the river at the time of the 1819 treaty with Spain, the scientific experts presented the court with volumes of evidence and elaborate arguments, much of it contradictory and involving creative interpretations of existing theories. The case exhibited all the now-familiar features of a trial using expert witnesses, for which it represents an early, overlooked, and particularly complex example. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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