Compensating Asbestos Victims
Compensating Asbestos Victims

Author: Andrea Boggio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-05-23

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1317162935

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This book traces the emergence and transformations of asbestos compensation to explore the wider issue of to what extent legal systems have converged in the era of globalization. Examining the mechanism by which asbestos compensation is delivered in Belgium, England, Italy and the United States, as well as the cultural forces and actors which contribute to its emergence and transformations, the book advances our understanding of how law operates within cultural norms, routines, and institutional relations of capitalist societies. With material gathered from 50 interviews and from primary and secondary sources, the author considers law as a cultural phenomenon, national styles of legal culture and the convergence and divergence of legal cultures, and law as a form of institutionalized power.

What Process is Due?
What Process is Due?

Author: David M. O'Brien

Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation

Published: 1988-03-30

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1610444299

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Are judges competent to decide complex scientific disputes over toxic chemicals and hazardous wastes? Have courts gone too far in awarding damages to victims? Does the judiciary unreasonably constrain free market forces and usurp power from democratically elected branches of government? What constitutes judicial "due process" in the regulation of health-safety and environmental risks? David O'Brien addresses these and other key questions in a comprehensive survey of the role of courts in resolving science-policy disputes. He theorizes that such disputes, with their burden of scientific uncertainty and intense value conflict, become judicialized in the United States because they pose an uncomfortable trilemma for policy makers: how to accommodate competing demands for scientific certainty, political compromise, and procedural fairness in the regulation of risks. When policy negotiations break down, courts are called on not to settle scientific controversies per se, but in their traditional role as independent tribunals for settling value conflicts and imposing norms in a pluralistic society. This interpretation is enhanced by a unique set of case studies, including DES and asbestos litigation and the ban on Tris (a carcinogenic flame-retardent). O'Brien's analytical framework and his detailed examples illuminate the extent, the implications, and the underlying causes of the judicialization of risk regulation.