Improving Institutions of Risk Management: Uncertain Causality and Judicial Review of Regulations

This chapter continues to consider questions of applied benefit-cost analysis and effective risk management, building on themes introduced in the previous two chapters. It expands the scope of the discussion to include a law-and-economics perspective on how different institutions—regulatory and judicial—involved in societal risk management can best work together to promote the public interest. In the interests of making the exposition relatively self-contained, we briefly recapitulate distinctions among types of causality and principles of causal inference that are discussed in more detail in Chap. 2 , as well as principles of benefit-cost analysis and risk psychology, including heuristics and biases, from Chap. 10 . In this chapter, however, the focus is less on individual, group, or organizational decision-making than on how rigorous judicial review of causal reasoning might improve regulatory risk assessment and policy.