Law Commons^™

The Right To Regulate (Cooperatively), Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

The growing number of new technologies in food production— such as nanotechnology, genetic modification, animal cloning, and irradiation—are garnering different regulatory responses around the world. Based on their threshold for tolerating risk, countries are asserting their national right to regulate at home using labeling, quarantine, and outright bans on foods. But domestic regulation has its limits in a free trade environment. Countries that are not mindful of treaty obligations could face legal liability, as seen in the recent litigation between Uruguay and Philip Morris International. In short, traditional models of international regulatory cooperation (IRC) are failing to provide countries with …

Check Please: Using Legal Liability To Inform Food Safety Regulation, Alexia Brunet Marks

Publications

Food safety is a hotly debated issue. While food nourishes, sustains, and enriches our lives, it can also kill us. At any given meal, our menu comes from a dozen different sources. Without proper incentives to encourage food safety, microbial pathogens can, and do enter the food source--so much so that according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), each year roughly one in six Americans (or forty-eight million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. What is the optimal way to prevent unsafe foods from entering the marketplace?

Safety in the food …

Genealogies Of Risk: Searching For Safety, 1930s-1970s, William Boyd

Publications

Health, safety, and environmental regulation in the United States are saturated with risk thinking. It was not always so, and it may not be so in the future. But today, the formal, quantitative approach to risk provides much of the basis for regulation in these fields, a development that seems quite natural, even necessary. This particular approach, while it drew on conceptual and technical developments that had been underway for decades, achieved prominence during a relatively short timeframe; roughly, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s--a time of hard looks and regulatory reform. Prior to this time, formal conceptions of …