I am very happy to say that a rather large project of mine has now been published. My new article is The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World, published in the Tennessee Law Review. Here is an excerpt from the introduction:
Underneath the countryside of Switzerland and France is the largest machine ever built. Seventeen miles around and requiring as much electricity as a medium-sized city, it is designed to create conditions hotter than any star in our galaxy. The thousands of scientists hovering over the device hope that when it reaches full power it will create particles that have not existed since the time of the Big Bang. Modestly named the “Large Hadron Collider” (“LHC”), the machine will be the most ambitious scientific experiment in humanity’s history.
The physics community is abuzz. Scientists everywhere are hoping to see something they have never seen before. Some are expecting to find the elusive Higgs boson. Others are looking for the dark matter that holds together the cosmos. Still others hope to see, in the tracers of subatomic shrapnel, the telltale signs of a microscopic black hole as it evaporates into nothingness.
Not everyone, however, is giddy with excitement. In particular, it is that last bit—about black holes—that has some people worried. An unhappy few are concerned that black holes produced by the LHC might not vanish, as expected. Instead, it is feared, they might linger. And grow.
Our planet, and everyone on it, detractors say, could be reduced to an infinitesimal lightless speck.
Thus, even without producing so much as a single exotic particle for physicists to study, the LHC has spawned something singularly exotic for lawyers and judges to grapple with—the world’s most extreme application for a preliminary injunction.
Pity the unlucky judge who draws this case on the docket. The case-file is replete with the infinite and the unknowable. The facts are, quite literally, more complex than anything on Earth. Help is everywhere, but trustworthiness is in short supply. For every potential expert witness has a personal stake in the matter—whether it is a desire to maintain a viable career in the sciences, or a fear of falling into an astronomical abyss. And one can hardly eschew the experts in favor of some hard, physical proof. The most relevant evidence, being in the physically unknowable center of a black hole, is, quite matter-offactly, at the bottom of a bottomless pit.
Then there are the stakes. Erring on the side of caution would suspend a great scientific adventure—our quest for the fundaments of nature.12 On the other hand, if we side with the experimenters, and they turn out to be wrong, the planet itself will wink out of existence.
A black hole, according to physics, is created by a “gravitational singularity”—a place where the very substance of space itself “suffers a devastating rupture.” The singularity is not directly observable. It remains hidden behind an event horizon—a boundary in space beyond which no matter, light, or even information can escape. In proximity to the singularity, conventional equations that describe the fabric of space and time begin to break down, and variables approach infinity.
Ironically, the case of the LHC produces an analogous result for the law: a jurisprudential singularity. The enormity of the alleged harm and the extreme complexity of the scientific factual issues combine to create seemingly irreducible puzzles of jurisprudence. Conundrums of equity, legal epistemology, jurimetrics, and jurisdiction are all caught up in the vortex: Traditional preliminary-injunction analysis begins to unravel when faced with the alleged harm of planet-ending calamity. Evidentiary law regarding expert testimony collapses in upon itself in the midst of absolutist scientific controversy. Moreover, jurists taking their own peek into the science are confronted with a kind of knowledge horizon that threatens to make the merits of the debate unobservable.
Can human law survive in a realm “where physical law ends”?
76 Tenn. L. Rev. 819-822 (citations omitted). The full article in pdf form is here.
