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Guerilla Decisionmaking: Judicial Review Of Risk Assessments, William H. Rodgers, Jr.

Articles

This paper describes four types of uncertainty confronted by decisionmakers undertaking risk assessments. It then discusses individual and institutional responses to uncertainty; these include both formal attempts to acquire more information, and pragmatic efforts to isolate and act upon salient considerations. The tendency of decisionmakers to narrow the agenda and search for a decisive datum or metaphor is called guerilla decisionmaking. Courts oversee agency decisions by techniques known widely in the legal community as the hard-look doctrine. This doctrine is defined, and the case law is used to illustrate how courts insist upon identification of salient risk-assessment factors and the …