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Full-Text Articles in Law

Leveling The Playing Field In Gmo Risk Assessment: Importers, Exporters, And The Limits Of Science, Alison Peck Jul 2010

Leveling The Playing Field In Gmo Risk Assessment: Importers, Exporters, And The Limits Of Science, Alison Peck

Law Faculty Scholarship

The WTO system requires that trade restrictions meant to protect health and safety be based on a risk assessment supported by “sufficient scientific evidence.” Scholars and international standards organizations have pointed out, however, that science is incapable of providing answers to questions of health and safety without incorporating the risk assessors’ value judgments and assumptions. Before GMO-importing countries conduct risk assessments, GMO-producing and exporting countries have already conducted their own risk assessments, which led to their decision to produce and market the products in the first place. Both the exporting and importing countries’ risk assessments employ science informed by the …


Insurance In Sociolegal Research, Tom Baker May 2010

Insurance In Sociolegal Research, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

Insurance has a long history in sociolegal research, most prominently as a window on accident compensation and related tort law in action. Recent work has extended that research, with the result that tort law in action may be the best mapped of any legal field outside criminal law. Sociological research has begun to explore insurance as a form of governance, with effects in many legal fields and across the economy. This essay reviews developments in both bodies of work. Part one examines the relationship between liability insurance and tort law in action using the metaphors of window and frame. Part …


S10rs Sgr No. 7 (Snow Days), Wale Apr 2010

S10rs Sgr No. 7 (Snow Days), Wale

Student Senate Enrolled Legislation

No abstract provided.


Private Regulation And Foreign Conduct, Adam I. Muchmore Jan 2010

Private Regulation And Foreign Conduct, Adam I. Muchmore

Journal Articles

Current U.S. policy on safety regulation for imported food is based largely on ex post measures. Several reform proposals seek to strengthen the ex ante component of this regulatory program. These proposals rely on one or more of three basic strategies: direct extraterritorial regulation; delegation of regulatory authority to private entities; and delegation of regulatory authority to foreign government agencies. This paper explores the ability of each strategy to respond to several principal-agent problems relevant to imported-food safety: the regulatory license problem; interest group capture; and the reality of bribery and threats in many food-exporting countries. Through the lens of …


Regional Maritime Security: Threats And Risk Assessments, Sam Bateman Jan 2010

Regional Maritime Security: Threats And Risk Assessments, Sam Bateman

Faculty of Law - Papers (Archive)

Regional maritime security: The maritime security of Southeast Asia reflects a range of enduring and dynamic factors. Enduring factors are mainly the geography of the region with its complex pattern of archipelagos, islands, bays and gulfs and narrow shipping channels; its heavy dependence on shipping for both domestic and intra-regional trade; and the importance of regional seas and their resources to the well-being of regional peoples. The dynamic factors include sovereignty disputes, the increasing levels and density of shipping traffic in the region, increased exploitation of marine resources, deteriorating fish stocks and marine habitats, growing naval budgets and higher levels …


Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman Jan 2010

Tontines For The Invincibles: Enticing Low Risks Into The Health-Insurance Pool With An Idea From Insurance History And Behavioral Economics, Tom Baker, Peter Siegelman

All Faculty Scholarship

Over one third of the uninsured adults in the U.S. below retirement age are between 19 and 29 years old. Young adults, especially men, often go without insurance, even when buying it is mandatory and sometimes even when it is a low cost employment benefit. This paper proposes a new form of health insurance targeted at this group—the “Young Invincibles”—those who (wrongly) believe that they don’t need health insurance because they won’t get sick. Our proposal offers a cash bonus to those who turn out to be right in their belief that they did not really need health insurance. The …


Cultural Cognition Of Scientific Consensus, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith Jan 2010

Cultural Cognition Of Scientific Consensus, Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, Hank Jenkins-Smith

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Why do members of the public disagree - sharply and persistently - about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The "cultural cognition of risk" refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals' beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting …


Preserving Human Potential As Freedom: A Framework For Regulating Epigenetic Harms, Fazal Khan Jan 2010

Preserving Human Potential As Freedom: A Framework For Regulating Epigenetic Harms, Fazal Khan

Scholarly Works

Epigenetics is a rapidly evolving scientific field of inquiry examining how a wide range of environmental, social, and nutritional exposures can dramatically control how genes are expressed without changing the underlying DNA. Research has demonstrated that epigenetics plays a large role in human development and in disease causation. In a sense, epigenetics blurs the distinction between “nature” and “nurture” as experiences (nurture) become a part of intrinsic biology (nature). Remarkably, some epigenetic modifications are durable across generations, meaning that exposures from our grandparents’ generation might affect our health now, even if we have not experienced the same exposures. In the …


Fairness And The Willingness To Accept Plea Bargain Offers, Avishalom Tor Jan 2010

Fairness And The Willingness To Accept Plea Bargain Offers, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

In contrast with the common assumption in the plea bargaining literature, we show fairness-related concerns systematically impact defendants' preferences and judgments. In the domain of preference, innocents are less willing to accept plea offers (WTAP) than guilty defendants and all defendants reject otherwise attractive offers that appear comparatively unfair. We also show that defendants who are uncertain of their culpability exhibit egocentrically biased judgments and reject plea offers as if they were innocent. The article concludes by briefly discussing the normative implications of these findings.


Developing Substantive Environmental Rights, Dinah L. Shelton Jan 2010

Developing Substantive Environmental Rights, Dinah L. Shelton

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Human rights tribunals facing claims of violations stemming from environmental degradation are increasingly incorporating and applying national and international environmental standards to assess whether or not the government in question has complied with its legal obligations. The government is required to comply with whatever environmental laws it has enacted as well as treaties to which it is a party. Furthermore the tribunals will assess, albeit with considerable deference, whether or not the environmental laws set the level of protection too low to allow the enjoyment of guaranteed human rights, in some instances drawing on the precautionary principle and other concepts …


Dworkin's Two Principles Of Dignity: An Unsatisfactory Nonconsequentialist Account Of Moral Duties, Kenneth Simons Jan 2010

Dworkin's Two Principles Of Dignity: An Unsatisfactory Nonconsequentialist Account Of Moral Duties, Kenneth Simons

Faculty Scholarship

In his ambitious and wide-ranging new book, Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin offers an alternative to consequentialist theories of law, political morality, moral duties, and personal ethics. Respect for human dignity, he says, entails two requirements: self-respect, i.e., taking the objective importance of your own life seriously; and authenticity, i.e., accepting a personal responsibility for identifying what counts as success in your own life. For Dworkin, these two principles of dignity do triple duty. First, as a matter of personal ethics, they provide guidance about what we should do in order to live well. Second, they elucidate the rights that …