ABSTRACT
Legal and administrative systems can be viewed as the vehicles a society uses for transmitting risk preferences to public decisionmakers, and for enabling those preferences to be reflected in public policy. This chapter deals with the “crosscutting” issue of whether such legal and administrative systems have implications, in and of themselves and independent of the substantive area of regulation involved, for the degree of precaution in risk regulation that results. We intend “degree of precaution” to encompass the timing and stringency of preventive regulation against future risks (Wiener 2002), but to be an entirely descriptive phrase and to imply no value or merits judgment as to the appropriateness or adequacy of such regulation. We illustrate our conclusions by reference to both ex ante and ex post regulation, in the context of the legal and administrative systems of the United States and the EU.
