Reason in Law

What should be done about airplane safety and terrorism, global warming, polluted water, nuclear power, and genetically engineered food? Decision-makers often respond to temporary fears, and the result is a situation of hysteria and neglect–and unnecessary illness and death. Risk and Reason explains the sources of these problems and explores what can be done about them. It shows how individual thinking and social interactions lead us in foolish directions. Offering sound proposals for social reform, it explains how a more sensible system of risk regulation, embodied in the idea of a "cost-benefit state," could save many thousands of lives and many billions of dollars too–and protect the environment in the process.

The law is going through a period of deep crisis, exemplified by continuing revelations of miscarriages of justice, which calls for radical reassessment of the relationship betwen law and morality. The technocratic efficiency aimed at by

The Age of Reason associated with the names of Descartes, Newton, Hobbes, and the French philosophers, actually began in the universities that first emerged in the late Middle Ages (1100 to 1600) when the first large scale institutionalization of reason in the history of civilization occurred.