Uncertainty is ‘the essence of being human’, writes Margaret Heffernan; all human activity has to grapple with the limits of our knowledge about the world. On 25 June 2025, the University of Bristol Law School hosted a panel discussion event to grapple along those lines: ‘Known Unknowns: Uncertainty, Art and Law’. This was the culmination of an interdisciplinary collaboration in which lawyers and artists explored intractable uncertainty problems and considered the different ways in which art and law encounter factual uncertainty. How do we understand it? Is it a threat to our credibility or an opportunity for discovery? And what means do lawyers and artists have to use or overcome it?
The law participants were Andrew J Bell and Joanna McCunn from the Law School’s Centre for Law and History Research; the artists were Lauren Godfrey and Jack Lewdjaw. In this blog post, they each reflect on their experience of the collaboration, and the insights that emerged in terms of the relationships between art, law and knowledge.
What initially excited you about the collaboration?
AB – For about seven years, Joanna and I have been working on a legal-historical and comparative project about law and uncertainty. It struck us that a lot of the features of the law’s engagement with uncertainty must be relatively idiosyncratic, given, for example, law’s particular interests in decisiveness and authoritative dispute resolution. We had found, for example, that law tends to cordon off uncertainty problems as niche single instances, rather than see a broader question; to work hard to protect the general authority of its evidential mechanisms; and to hide any compromises it is forced to make to produce single, decisive answers. We wanted to see how people working in a different field without these concerns might understand and deal with uncertainty. For instance, whereas the law treats uncertainty fundamentally as a problem, we wondered if artists would think more positively about what it provides.