Wendy Wagner

• University of Texas at Austin

The new demarcation problem asks whether and how we can identify illegitimate values in scientific inquiry. Yet given the multiple contexts and audiences of science advice occurring in practice, a single strategy or set of ex ante criteria may not be the best way to approach this difficult puzzle. This paper offers a mapping of several distinct typ...

Legislative design impedes study of chemicals in the environment

The politicization of science is a recurring phenomenon in US federal policymaking that is explained in part by the unstructured, collaborative nature of decision-making in most science-intensive US regulatory programs. In this chapter we spotlight some of the most significant worries arising from this longstanding approach to U.S. institutional de...

Examination of U.S. and EU regulatory systems raises more questions than answers

A variety of economic and ideological forces threaten the integrity of public health research.1–4 In response, the editors of the top biomedical journals now require conflict of interest disclosures for submissions. Their increasingly extensive disclosure policies have resulted in some progress towards protecting the integrity of public health rese...

One of the most significant problems facing environmental law is the dearth of scientific information available to assess the impact of industrial activities on public health and the environment. After documenting the significant gaps in existing information, this Article argues that existing laws both exacerbate and perpetuate this problem. By fai...

Recently, there has been a trend in both civil litigation and regulatory law to circumvent the scientific community's collective judgment on the quality of individual studies with an adversarial process of evaluating scientific quality using interest groups. The Supreme Court's Daubert v Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc opinion and two recent "good...

One of the most significant problems facing environmental law is the dearth of scientific information available to assess the impact of industrial activities on public health and the environment. After documenting the significant gaps in existing information, this Article argues that existing laws both exacerbate and perpetuate this problem. By fai...

The imperative that agencies use sound science in developing their regulations has become a major preoccupation of the political branches. In only a few years, Congress passed two appropriations riders that provide extensive new mechanisms for the public to critique the science used by agencies. The executive branch quickly followed suit, promulgat...

The leading biomedical journals have established policies that attempt to ensure their published articles are transparent to commercial bias. Federal regulatory agencies, charged with protecting the public's health and environment, have no similar conflict-of-interest requirements. The authors of this Policy Forum urge that private parties who subm...