Expertise in Regulation and Law.

Vol. 15 No.6 (June 2005), pp.537-538

EXPERTISE IN REGULATION AND LAW, by Gary Edmond (ed). Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishers, 2004. 302pp. Hardback. $99.95/£55.00. ISBN: 0754624013.

Reviewed by Paul Teske, Graduate School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Science Center. Email: Paul.Teske@cudenver.edu .

This book is an edited collection, coming from a 2002 conference in Canberra on the topic of expertise. Gary Edmond is a member of the law faculty at the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Edited conference volumes rarely exceed the sum of their parts, sometimes equal that sum, but most often present something less to readers. While there is much of interest in this volume, I find the latter the overall sense a reader is likely to glean from it. Part of the problem is the issues related to expertise are quite broad, in both legal and regulatory settings. Some of the book focuses upon very specific legal decisions about the admissibility of expert testimony in legal proceedings; other sections abstract into very broad philosophical questions of what expertise actually means compared to other forms of evidence; and some of the book is about specific examples of expertise in particular regulatory settings. Often these do not feel connected. Moreover, the analysis was not well served by the heavy dose of “30,000 foot” philosophical and sociological approaches; I expected some more political-economic or law-and-economic rigor to be attached to some of these issues.

Although the wide lens might leave the reader feeling unable to absorb the entire picture of expertise in a meaningful way, the advantage is that one can follow some of the many specific threads. Recent news reports suggest that “junk science” is often presented in legal proceedings for corporate or individual financial gain, and that scientific data can be misused for political advantage. The media’s approach to these issues certainly confuses citizens about the value, or even the existence, of true expertise. It is nearly as difficult for many scholars to sort through the relevant issues, and this book provides some nice examples and valuable reflections to better understand the problem.

Another element of the book that provides both advantages and disadvantages is the multi-national perspective. The primary focus is on Anglo nations (UK, US, and Australia) with somewhat similar legal and regulatory structures. But, there are important institutional differences across these systems, and unless a scholar is highly interested in the comparative aspects, the institutional focus of the book is a bit vague, even regarding legal and regulatory policy.

Individual chapters address expertise in the pharmaceutical sector, which has been a hot topic recently in the U.S., expertise in U.S. environmental regulation, health risks related to electric and magnetic fields, fingerprint expertise, DNA profiling, and ethical [*538] issues in expertise. One chapter presents an anthropological study of Aboriginal claims (which, although interesting, fits in least well of all the chapters). I found the pharmaceutical study (by John Abrahams) and the environmental study (by Marc Eisner) to be the most useful and interesting of these chapters.

Edmond is author or co-author of three chapters, which help to provide a somewhat tighter focus. Edmond gives substantial attention to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, DAUBERT v. MERRELL DOW PHARMACEUTICALS, INC. (1993), which provided judges with more autonomy to interpret the standards for allowing expert evidence into trial proceedings. The introduction and conclusion provide considerable material on the making of this decision, its broader implications, and the impact on subsequent cases. Jasanoff’s work on “the fifth branch” – scientists as policy makers – and Popper’s approaches to scientific reasoning figure prominently. Generally, this is an excellent demonstration of the strong interrelationship among politics, social context, and decisions about what constitutes useful and valid expertise.

EXPERTISE IN REGULATION AND LAW will be most useful to legal scholars interested in standards of expert evidence, although the analysis jumps between highly specific, on-the-ground examples and cases, and extremely general consideration of expertise as a social-philosophical phenomenon. Those more interested in regulatory issues will find the book too specific and legalistic at times, and too general and vague elsewhere. The book works best in the areas where the concrete and the abstract are better connected. This is hard to accomplish consistently with multiple authors, and it is an all too common problem in edited collections.

CASE REFERENCE:

DAUBERT v. MERRELL DOW PHARMACEUTICALS, INC., 509 US 579 (1993).

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