 Jury,” a narrative account of his experience as the jury foreman on a Manhattan murder trial. He said that the experience of an actual courtroom stimulated his interest in the historical relationship between science and the law.
Mock trial tests students’ knowledge
To bring the subject of “Trying Leviathan” to life, Burnett split the students in his freshman seminar into two groups and assigned each team to act as lawyers in a mock appeal of the Maurice v. Judd trial. They prepared legal strategy memos for their “clients” and wrote briefs analyzing the problems at issue in the case. The assignment required that the students, in researching and framing their arguments, limit themselves to material that was available in 1818. The appeal was conducted before three graduate students in the Program in the History of Science, who played the roles of appellate judges.
“The rationale was to get them thinking like historians,” said Burnett. “I want them to get a feel for how you grasp the way people of the past made sense of the world. You have to submerge yourself in what they knew and blinker yourself with respect to the future — of which they had no inkling.”
That wasn’t easy, said student Erin Buchholtz.
“The word ‘scientist’ wasn’t even coined until the 1830s,” she said. “Additionally, it was hard to debate that whales were mammals — the word ‘mammal’ was considered obscene and offensive because it originated from the word ‘mammary.’”
Nevertheless, Buchholtz enjoyed posing as an attorney for the “whale is not a fish” team.
“The class has gotten us to look at history and science in a way we’d never thought of,” she said. “It’s opened up new thought processes and perspectives for a wide variety of ideas. It’s not uncommon for us to continue discussing things we talked about in class on the way back to our dorms, or at dinner the next day.”
“The trial was a lot of fun,” said Cameron Myhrvold. “Professor Burnett makes the subject exciting — he injects a lot of enthusiasm into our discussions.”
Sarah Strobel also has enjoyed the seminar. “We talked for two and a half hours — without stopping — about our favorite parts of ‘Moby-Dick,’ a novel that intimidated me before this class,” she said.
The massive subject of whales is one that Burnett will continue to explore. He is currently completing another book on whales, which will finish the trajectory of “Trying Leviathan.”
“The book focuses on the 20th century and the vast exploitative whaling industry, which was critical to a number of countries,” Burnett said. He chronicles how the perception of whales was radically transformed in a century’s time. Seen as mere beasts in the 1800s, whales during the 20th century moved to “the center of a transformed relationship to the natural world and became critical to the emergence of the global environmental movement. They were totems of the peace movement and symbols of the counterculture.” Changing scientific ideas, Burnett said, turned the “soulless monsters of the 19th century into soulful friends of humanity.”