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112 Nw. U. L. Rev. Online 161 (2017-2018)
How Do Lawyers Think Differently from Stem Professionals When Approaching Problems and Risk

handle is hein.journals/nulro112 and id is 161 raw text is: Bridges II Special Project: Responses Bridges II: The Law-STEM Alliance & Next Generation Innovation Jessica Silbey* How do lawyers think differently from STEM professionals when approaching problems and risk? Although I hesitate to generalize, historically the training of lawyers and STEM professionals aimed to cultivate different kinds of thinking about the domains of their expertise, and thus the scope of problems those professionals are capable of solving. Lawyers are trained to teach themselves new areas of law by reading statutes, regulations, and cases. Because of our broader understanding of the institutions that adjudicate legal disputes, such as arbitrations, mediations, courts, administrative agencies, we feel comfortable predicting the application of the law by other lawyers and the way a legal dispute will proceed through resolution. We are comfortable as generalists within the law, to an extent, and are trained to be quick, competent studies when we encounter something new. We also encounter many industries, actors, and organizations within a general practice of business consulting or dispute resolution, and thus have the experience of wide and detailed exposure to these essential elements of society. Yet whether that experience translates into particularly useful knowledge beyond law is a contested question among our clients, I think. STEM professionals circumscribe their expertise more narrowly, I believe. They are trained within disciplines that respect boundaries and defer to (or defend) those boundaries as meaningfully separating roles and functions within, for example, science and engineering. Interdisciplinarity within science and engineering may be embraced through collaborations by adding parts to each other brick by brick, but laboratories and experiments that seek to answer questions or test propositions tend to rely on constrained and unitary disciplinary methods. Facts or knowledge produced in science and engineering may be perceived as less constrained by social factors (although I think that is a misperception), and they are perceived to be more durable because by definition in science and engineering facts or scientific knowledge are reproducible, predictable, and objective. There is less inclination for cross-disciplinary knowledge production, I believe, because * Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law, co-director of Northeastern University's Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity (CLIC) and faculty at NuLab for Maps, Texts and Networks. 161 112: 133 (2018)

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