Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law

Foster, Kenneth R., David E. Bernstein & Peter W. Huber, Eds.

ISBN 10: 0262061562 / ISBN 13: 9780262061568

Published by MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1993

About this Item

Laid in is a copy of Civil Justice Report from the Manhattan Institute's Judicial Studies Program (No. 1, Jan. 1994) which contains a review of this book and an interview with the editors. Mild rubbing/scratching to dust jacket panels, now in protective plastic cover. Size: 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall.

Seller Inventory # 001425

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Phantom Risk: Scientific Inference and the Law
• Publisher: MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0262061562
• ISBN 13: 9780262061568
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Political Science & Law

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.