ABSTRACT
The Agent Orange, DES, and Bhopal litigations come to mind. Federal appellate courts also review for reasonableness the decisions of a wide variety of administrative agencies which frequently involve science and technology. The independence of the federal judiciary, guaranteed by the Constitution's life tenure and salary protection clauses, offers a nonpoliticized check on such decision-making that is not available elsewhere. In tort law, judges are allowed to decide for themselves or with a jury what constitutes an "unreasonable risk" upon the basis of the scientific facts which have been presented in court. In sum, a top priority may be to educate judges in the techniques of risk-benefit analysis to give them a better perspective for coping with the complex technological and scientific policy judgments that come into their courts. Judges might also need more basic scientific training to make factual judgments about the underlying scientific and technological evidence that confronts them at trial or in the appellate record.
