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The recent reauthorisation of glyphosate in the European Union is a uniquely suitable opportunity to study the relationships between law and science because, unlike many other controversies that are commonly perceived through the science/democracy dichotomy, in this case the disagreement was between the “scientific” assessments of two purely “expert” bodies, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). This paper takes a close look at some details of the two assessments to show how scientific assessments are shaped by the legal environment to such an extent that it is impossible to separate “legal” from “technical” issues at any level; they are entangled together “all the way down”. Furthermore, it identifies three side effects of this entanglement that were previously unnoticed. First, obscure legal rules may provide (usually unintended) leverage to …