Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law [Hardcover]

Kenneth R. Foster (Editor), David E. Bernstein (Editor), Peter W. Huber (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 4, 1993 | ISBN-10: 0262061562 | ISBN-13: 978-0262061568

Phantom risks are risks whose very existence is unproven and perhaps unprovable, yet they raise real problems at the interface of science and the law. Phantom Risk surveys a dozen scientific issues that have led to public controversy and litigation - among them, miscarriage from the use of video display terminals, birth defects in children whose mothers used the drug Bendectin, and cancer from low-intensity magnetic fields, and from airborne asbestos. It presents the scientific evidence behind these and other issues and summarizes the resulting litigation.

Focusing on the great disparity between the scientific evidence that is sufficient to arouse public fears and that needed to establish a hazard or its absence, these original contributions probe the problem of scientific ambiguity in risk assessment, and the mayhem this creates in the courtroom.

Although the authors are clearly optimistic about the use of science to detect and evaluate risks, they recognize the difficulty of inferring cause-and-effect relationships from epidemiological (observational) evidence and of inferring risks to humans from high-dose animal experiments, the two major sources of evidence. The final chapter reviews the exceptionally difficult problem of how the legal impact of disputes about phantom risks can be reduced.

Editorial Reviews

Review

" Phantom Risk is a much needed antidote for the hysteria overlow-level insult that pervades and debilitates our society." Alvin M. Weinberg , Distinguished Fellow, Oak RidgeAssociated Universities

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Kenneth R. Foster is Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

David E. Bernstein is an attorney at the law firm of Crowell & Moring.

Peter W. Huber is a Senior Fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and serves as Counsel to the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 469 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (June 4, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262061562
• ISBN-13: 978-0262061568
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,148,573 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Bernstein (George Mason) is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, Virginia, where he has been teaching since 1995. He was a Visiting Professor at Georgetown University Law Center for Spring 2003 semester, at the University of Michigan School of Law for the 2005-06 academic year, and at Brooklyn Law School in Fall 2006.

Professor Bernstein is a nationally recognized expert on the Daubert case and the admissibility of expert testimony, and he is a past chairperson of the Association of American Law Schools Evidence section. Professor Bernstein is the coauthor of The New Wigmore: Expert Evidence (Aspen Law and Business 2003; 2d edition 2011), and coeditor of Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law (MIT 1993).

Professor Bernstein is also an expert on the "Lochner era" of American constitutional jurisprudence. He is the author of Only One Place of Redress: African-Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal (Duke 2001), and of Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform (University of Chicago Press 2011).

Professor Bernstein is also the the author of You Can't Say That! The Growing Threat to Civil Liberties from Antidiscrimination Laws (Cato Institute 2003).

In addition to his books, Professor Bernstein is is the author of dozens of frequently cited scholarly articles, book chapters, and think tank studies, including articles and review essays in the Yale Law Journal, Michigan Law Review (2), Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review (2), Georgetown Law Journal (2), Vanderbilt Law Review, California Law Review, Washington University Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Boston University Law Review, and Iowa Law Review.

At George Mason, David Bernstein teaches Products Liability, Evidence, Constitutional Law I and II, and Expert and Scientific Evidence. He is a contributor to the popular Volokh Conspiracy blog.