Does wearing a mask stop the spread of COVID-19? Is climate change driven primarily by human-made emissions? With these kinds of issues dividing the public, it sometimes feels as if Americans are losing our ability to agree about basic facts of the world. There have been widespread disagreements about matters of seemingly objective fact in the past, yet the number of recent examples can make it feel as though our shared sense of reality is shrinking.
As a law professor, I’ve written about legal challenges to vaccination requirements and COVID-19 restrictions, as well as what counts as “truth” in court. In other words, I spend a lot of time mulling over how people define truth, and why U.S. society has such a hard time agreeing on it these days.
