A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas faculty in the previous year.
Published by Harvard University Press, Bending Science takes a hard look at the ways and extent to which scientific data are misused and abused in regulatory and tort law, focusing in on misdeeds by corporations, plaintiff attorneys, think tanks, and government agencies. Using case studies, the authors dissect the techniques by which perpetrators create research tailored to their commercial or political needs, conceal unwelcome data, spin public perception about matters of science, discredit legitimate but “inconvenient” research, and bully the scientists who produce it. McGarity and Wagner propose a series of reforms, as well, including forcing “bent” science into the sunlight and providing more vigorous oversight for the use of science in policymaking. The book was inspired in part by McGarity and Wagner's participation in various "clean science" conversations at gatherings of CPR's Member Scholars.
The award is sponsored by the University Co-operative Society and is considered the highest honor of literary achievement given to published authors at The University. McGarity is the immediate past President of the Center for Progressive Reform and the Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long Endowed Chair in Administrative Law. Wagner is the Joe A. Worsham Centennial Professor in Law at The University of Texas at Austin.
There’s more on the book here. Or you can just break down and buy it from Amazon or Harvard. A paperback edition is on its way in the spring.
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Matthew Freeman | November 2, 2009
A little bragging is in order this morning. Last week, CPR Member Scholars Tom McGarity and Wendy Wagner won the University of Texas’s Hamilton Book Author Award for their book, Bending Science: How Special Interests Corrupt Public Health Research. The award is given to the author(s) of what is judged the best book by University of Texas […]
Matthew Freeman | October 30, 2009
One of the great political communications successes of the past 30 years has been the right wing’s relentless assault on the American regulatory system. Think of the words and images that have come to be associated with “regulation” in that time: red tape, bureaucrats, green eye shades, piles of paper stretching to the ceiling, and more. And the […]
Ben Somberg | October 30, 2009
This guest post is written by Thomas Tolin, Assistant Professor of Economics at West Chester University, and Martin Patwell, Director of the Office of Services for Students with Disabilities at WCU. In the recently published SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance the authors, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen […]
Ben Somberg | October 29, 2009
Today the Consumer Product Safety Comission released three draft reports on its findings so far regarding contaminated Chinese drywall. Here’s how the Sarasota Herald-Tribune puts the development: In what is sure to inflame lawmakers on Capitol Hill, the federal government issued a report on Thursday about Chinese drywall that stopped short of linking the material […]
Daniel Farber | October 29, 2009
Cross-posted from Legal Planet. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post had lead stories Wednesday on the politics of climate change legislation. The Post’s story centered on the increasing focus of the debate on the economic impact of climate legislation and on the difficulty of establishing the facts: In anticipation, groups on the left […]
Ben Somberg | October 27, 2009
Super Freakonomics, which came out last week, has been critiqued thoroughly (UCS has a good library of their own critiques and links to others) for its embrace of geoengineering as the cheap fix to that problem called global warming, and the book’s methods generally have also been critiqued as lacking. But yesterday brought a new […]
Catherine O'Neill | October 26, 2009
Three recent developments in the saga of efforts to regulate mercury emissions from coal-fired utilities are significant. Early last week, Michigan became the twenty-third state to require coal-fired utilities within its jurisdiction to reduce their mercury emissions. Michigan’s regulation requires these sources to cut mercury emissions by 90% by 2015. Then, on Thursday, the EPA […]
Shana Campbell Jones | October 23, 2009
As climate change legislation awaits action in the Senate, serious and complicated legal and policy questions about the tools designed to reduce carbon emissions remain. Truly, the climate change debate operates in two distinct worlds. The first is becoming increasingly hysterical, consisting of sensational and camera-ready protests and attacks underwritten by groups such as the […]
Matt Shudtz | October 22, 2009
In Wednesday’s Federal Register, EPA unveiled a new, streamlined process through which agency scientists will systematically review old chemical profiles in the IRIS database and update them with the latest toxicological information. With everything from Clean Air Act residual risk determinations about hazardous air pollutants to Superfund site cleanup standards to Safe Drinking Water Act […]