Mandatory Service: Science Court Verdict In

Archive of Fall 2021 Science Court Case

This page includes some information of the Science Court case tried in Spring 2021. The full article can be viewed on the Science Court page which includes the case statement, details on the student teams that prepared, reported and tried the case, and the jury that made the decision. Links are provided to recordings and slides of all information presented at the trial on April 24, 2021 and the verdict announcement on April 27, 2021 (following the jury's deliberation on April 25):

For additional information on this case with weekly updates and detailed reporting on the trial, visit the blog page.

You can watch the entire trial and verdict on YouTube, or click on the individual segments linked to on this page.

For information on how to cite this Science Court case, click here.

2021 Science Court Case

The Science Court Case Statement is made up of two parts: a problem that needs to be addressed, and a proposed solution. The SciCourt case for Spring 2021:

To fight polarization in American society, a mandatory national service should be adopted.

The pros and cons of the case are argued by students in the legal team based on reliable scientific evidence (soft and hard science) collected by the science team students. The pro and con legal teams are each responsible for proposing complete solutions for addressing the posited problem, one that is more on the pro side (the "pro-ish" proposal), and one that is more on the con side (the "con-ish" proposal). This approach is designed to ensure that the pro and con legal teams consider the posited problem comprehensively, and not simply attempt to poke holes in each others' arguments. The pro-ish and con-ish proposals are presented to the jury as two competing worldviews.

For the present case, the pro legal team argued for a large-scale mandatory service program, and the con legal team argued for an approach based on expanding and extending existing voluntary service programs.

Read the full article on the Science Court website.

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