Law

The idea that law struggles to keep pace with technological change has in recent years become a trope. New technologies convey social benefits but also unexpected potential harm. This is particularly troubling in the context of international law, where military technological breakthroughs can disrupt multilateral consensus about who owes whom what. Puzzlingly, old laws are often robust to disruptive technological change, even when there are strong incentives for powerful parties to push for overhaul.

While contestation of the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder paradigm is as old as the diagnostic category itself, the debate about what PTSD is and how to compensate victims remains unsolved to this day. Existing scholarship has examined how community organizing for compensation rights by Vietnam veterans, rape survivors, and high-risk workers has influenced the recognition of PTSD as a diagnostic category. But the intertwined juridical and scientific procedures through which PTSD evidence is indeed produced have received scant attention from the social sciences.