Academic

Shapiro on Risk Assessment

By Lawrence Solum

Sidney A. Shapiro (Wake Forest University School of Law) has posted Omb and the Politicization of Risk Assessment (Environmental Law, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2007) on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

In January 2007, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) withdrew its proposed draft Risk Assessment Bulletin (Bulletin), containing guidelines for the conduct of all risk assessments by government agencies, after being advised by a committee of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences that the guidelines were too flawed to be repairable. OMB?s failures can be attributed to its lack of scientific expertise, but OMB also saw the guidelines as an opportunity to politicize the risk assessment process in the federal government. This Article explores the potential for politicization of science in safety, health, and environmental regulation, and how the Bush Administration sought to take advantage of this potential in the proposed guidelines. It also considers what role OMB should play in the development of risk assessment guidelines, concluding that OMB should play an agenda setting and coordination role to improve agency science as necessary, but the actual job of writing scientific guidelines should be left to the agencies themselves.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 20, 2008 (boomark / email).