Legal Construction of Public Health Risks (review)

Wen-Tsong Chiou ed., Legal Construction of Public Health Risks Institutum Iurisprudentiae (Preparatory Office), Taipei, 2007, 251 pp Wenmay Rei Received: 4 August 2008 /Accepted: 4 August 2008 / Published online: 6 February 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 Four years has passed since the pandemics of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) manifested how vulnerable societies can be toward public health risks, and how societies’ safety is intertwined in this global society. Since then, under the auspice of the World Health Organization, governments worldwide have been reviewing their policies and infrastructures, hoping to be better prepared for any future pandemics. Some of these efforts involve statutory revisions, some of them not. Yet, if the legal system in each country represents the infrastructure of how governments can impose coercive powers upon its citizens facing public health risks, how has the law responded to these public health risks? How well have they done? Bringing together six scholars of law, science, and technology, the anthology of “Legal construction of Public Heath Risks” presents a colorful sampler of the diverse possibilities how legal discourse can contribute to the issue. Boldly entitled “Legal construction of Public Health Risks,” the anthology actually talks more about the government more than law, and endeavors to present and critique on how governments perceive public health risk in different issues, how they have responded to it, and how should they respond. As the organizer of the symposium that led toward this anthology, Wen-Tsong Chiou gives a very good introduction in the beginning of this book. Chiou notices that traditionally, at least in Taiwan, the legal academia seems to perceive the law being able only to respond to scientific development passively; paradoxically, the science circle also regard themselves as having no choice but to accept legal regulation passively. Under this vision of law, science, and technology, the law deals with value issues while science pursues objective facts which are value neutral. In response, Chiou raised a Study of Science Technology and Society (STS) question that is only beginning to be inquired in Taiwan’s legal academia: how has science East Asia Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2008) 2:453–455 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9059-0 W. Rei (*) Division of Law and Policy, Institute of Public Health, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei, Taiwan e-mail: wmrei@ym.edu.tw constructed specific concepts in law? How has the law fostered certain “scientific facts”? Perhaps as a result of the subject of their topic, Huei-Chih Niu and Yao-Ming Hsu’s analysis on risk assessment and risk communication seems to imply that science can be objective. Though they both place an emphasis on public participation in risk communication, for Niu, the purpose of it is to foster the public’s trust for biobank (pp. 183–184); while for Hsu, the purpose is a requirement of good policy-making or deliberative democracy, but did not elaborate on why these two concepts require it (pp. 212–213). In contrast, Michael Lynch, Wen-Tsong Chiou, and particularly Kevin ChienChang Wu is more suspicious of expertise’ neutrality and the fact that science can be objective. Michael Lynch uses the development of DNA evidence to demonstrate how its “objective” appearance and durability over time has shaken the court’s application of “finality,” which sets a time limit one can reopen a convicted case. Wen-Tsong Chiou looks into how people’s idea of occupational risk and governance can reshape the interpretation of causation in worker’s compensation and how Taiwan law fails to embrace such change and leaves workers to shoulder a lot of work-related risks themselves. Likewise, by reviewing the development of worldwide pandemic such as SARS and the International Health Regulation it led to, Kevin Chien-Chang Wu argues that the complexity, diversity, uncertainty of an assessment of pandemic risks, and the public’s viewpoint toward these uncertainties make risk analysis extremely difficult. Nevertheless, Wu stops short of denouncing the utility of these “scientific’ analysis, and argues that, though risk analysis has its shortcomings, just as using Prozac against depression, it is useful and can be useful when used with care. These two different perceptions of the objectivity of risk assessment...