If the relationship between science and law had a Facebook status, they would both likely select, "It's complicated." Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of "the lawless science of our law, that codeless myriad of precedent, that wilderness of single instances." Into this wilderness, ungoverned by either law or science, wanders the International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF). This month, the ITTF has made major strides toward the advancement of both disciplines. First, in science news, 2019 ITTF Sports Science Congress has published its Proceedings Book. The congress was held at the the University of Pécs, Hungary, in advance of the 2019 World Championships in Budapest. There, the world's leading sport scientists presented their findings. The result is a 406-page proceedings book, detailing everything you wanted to know about table tennis but were afraid to ask. Topics range from "The Neural Underpinnings of Visuomotor Reaction Speed in Elite Youth Table Tennis" to "Perceived Anger Profiles In Table Tennis Players: Burnout and Coping," with many surprises in between. Collectively, the studies contribute to the advancement of our understanding of table tennis, as well as to the advancement of science itself. Now, here's the latest from "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog" (for the "Arrested Development" fans out there). For an international governing body of sport such as the ITTF, questions inevitably arise about accountability. Provided that President Thomas Weikert and his Executive Committee operate within the boundaries of relevant national and international laws, to whom must they answer? Recent rifts in the ITTF power structure have renewed this debate. In May of 2020, two of the highest-ranking ITTF executives, ITTF Deputy President Khalil Al-Mohannadi and Executive Vice-President for Finance Petra Sörling, wrote a scathing open letter condemning President Thomas Weikert. Al-Mohannadi and Sörling questioned Weikert's leadership and ethics, all but begging for someone to oppose him in the 2021 election. The coup appears to have been quelled, however, as both would-be insurrectionists retain their positions. Then, only last November, the German Table Tennis Federation (DTTB) President Michael Geiger also raised concerns about ITTF governance. Specifically, Geiger expressed concerns about the ITTF's new commercial enterprise, World Table Tennis (WTT), which he feared would exert excessive power through self-appointed positions. He concluded by calling for an independent review of the ITTF and WTT. Rather than fomenting worldwide outrage, Geiger's alarmist rant was echoed only by French Table Tennis Federation President Christian Palierne. Nevertheless, the ITTF responded to the allegations by hiring accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) to review their books. PwC found no wrongdoing, which the ITTF trumpeted as exoneration. Perhaps in response to such persistent internecine squabbling, the ITTF has taken the law out of its own hands. On February 8, 2021, the ITTF Tribunal was officially established. The tribunal consists of seven lawyers, each with a background in sports governance. This ostensibly independent body of arbiters is now on retainer, ready to peaceably adjudicate the ITTF's internal disputes. Science uses laws, such as the law of gravity, to make sense of our universe, but these laws are discovered rather than made. Law, in turn, uses science as the basis for evidentiary procedure. The science of forensics entails the rigorous examination of evidence, whether by high school debate teams or your local CSI spinoff. Furthermore, law itself aspires to a scientific standard as a synthesis of historical, philosophical and anthropological studies. In his 1965 novel, "Dune," Frank Herbert went so far as to write, "Law is the ultimate science." Right on cue, 18th-century Irish actor Charles Macklin would anachronistically retort, "The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science." In other words, it's complicated.

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