The concept of "irreversibility" plays a large role in the theory and practice of environmental protection. Indeed, the concept is explicit in some statements of the Precautionary Principle. But the idea of irreversibility ...

In law and politics, some people are trimmers. They attempt to steer between the poles. Trimming might be defended as a heuristic for what is right, as a means of reducing political conflict over especially controversial ...

Many people believe that when national security is threatened, federal courts should defer to the government. Many other people believe that in times of crisis, citizens are vulnerable to a kind of "panic" that leads to ...

Why do adolescents take risks? What is the appropriate response to adolescent risk-taking? This Commentary for a special issue of Developmental Review, discussing a set of papers in that issue, explores these questions ...

Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make ...

A large body of empirical evidence demonstrates that judicial review of agency action is highly politicized, in the sense that Republican appointees are significantly more likely to invalidate liberal agency decisions than ...

The last decade has witnessed the birth of the New Legal Realism - an effort to go beyond the old realism by testing competing hypotheses about the role of law and politics in judicial decisions, with reference to large ...

Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Secretary of Labor is authorized to issue whatever standards are reasonably necessary or appropriate to provide safe or healthful places of employment. More than any other ...

In many cases, the Supreme Court has limited the scope of “substantive due process” by reference to tradition. Due process traditionalism might be defended in several distinctive ways. The most ambitious defense draws on ...