Science, politics and institutional design in regulation.

The politicization of science is a recurring phenomenon in US federal policymaking that is explained in part by the unstructured, collaborative nature of decision-making in most science-intensive US regulatory programs. In this chapter we spotlight some of the most significant worries arising from this longstanding approach to U.S.

Daubert and the proper role for the courts in health, safety, and environmental regulation.

Assigning a Daubert-like gatekeeper role to courts engaged in judicial review of risk assessments prepared by federal agencies is a profoundly bad idea.I describe the role of courts in reviewing regulatory agency decision-making and explore the potential impact of incorporating Daubert principles into administrative law. A Daubert form of judicial review will prevent agencies from employing a "weight of the evidence" approach, forcing them to adopt a "corpuscular" approach that rewards efforts by regulatees to find and exaggerate flaws in individual scientific studies.

Legislating "sound science": the role of the tobacco industry.

In the late 1990s, in an effort to dispute the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer, Philip Morris initiated a campaign to legislate "sound science." The campaign involved enacting data access and data quality laws to obtain previously confidential research data in order to re-analyze it based on industry-generated data quality standards. Philip Morris worked with other corporate interests to form coalitions and work-groups, develop a "data integrity" outreach program, sponsor symposia on "research integrity," and draft language for the new acts.