Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law

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

ISBN 10: 0262061562 / ISBN 13: 9780262061568

Published by MI, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1993

About this Item

Bound in the publisher's original black cloth with the spine stamped in gilt.

Seller Inventory # 001165

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law
• Publisher: MI, Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262061562
• ISBN 13: 9780262061568
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Fine Condition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine Condition
• Seller catalogs:
  • Science

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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