Lawyering is not just reading cases, briefs, contracts and other documents. My practice invites, if not compels, me to remain abreast of wider social, political and regulatory policies which impact not only the public, but the specific rights and rules implicated in a lawsuit for personal injury or death arising from defective products, whether it be defective autos and tires or dangerously defective drugs and workplaces.
Hence, the recent book, Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, by David Michaels, {amazon, barnes&noble} is important and should be widely read and discussed. Consider the Table of Contents from the book, which shows the range and depth of the social and political problems caused by the self-interested manufacture of wrongful doubt:
Introduction: "Sound Science" or "Sounds Like Science"?
The Manufacture of Doubt
Workplace Cancer before OSHA: Waiting for the Body Count
America Demands Protection
Why Our Children Are Smarter Than We Are
The Enronization of Science
Tricks of the Trade: How Mercenary Scientists Mislead You
Defending Secondhand Smoke
Still Waiting for the Body Count
Chrome-Plated Mischief
Popcorn Lung: OSHA Gives Up
Defending the Taxicab Standard
The Country Has a Drug Problem
Daubert: The Most Influential Supreme Court Ruling You've Never Heard Of
The Institutionalization of Uncertainty
The Bush Administration's Political Science
Making Peace with the Past
Four Ways to Make the Courts Count
Sarbanes-Oxley for Science: A Dozen Ways to Improve Our Regulatory System
In the introduction, the author relates a maddening instance of manufacturers' callous disregard of public, that is, human, safety. The "aspirin manufacturers delayed the FDA's regulation [requiring a warning on the link between aspirin intake by children and Reye's syndrome] by arguing that the science establishing the aspirin link was incomplete, uncertain, and unclear." Before the regulation was enforced, many children died; after the regulation was enforced, "less than a handful" of cases are reported in any given year.
In this series of posts, I will be considering the author's facts and arguments, putting them in the context of a trial lawyer's practice focused on product defect and the liability for injury by those defective products. The legal system, and your rights to recover for injury caused by negligent and reckless conduct, is in may ways shaped by wider concerns such as the use--rather, the misuse or abuse--of science by irresponsible and profit-hungry manufacturers.
For many years now, the big corporate interests have made a concerted effort to paint the proofs of defective products by trial lawyers as junk science, but the real story is the junk doubt that these corporate interests have manufactured and instilled on the part of policy-makers, legislators and judges. Time to expose the doubt and uncertainty for what it really is - JUNK.
