Science Anti-Science and the 'Right to Know'

• In Event: Lost in Translation: (The Politics of) Expertise in Legal and Regulatory Translation Spaces Session 1

Abstract

In October 2017 the United States Court Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal by the CTIA Wireless Association (US trade Organisation representing the Cell Phone Industry) to block a mandate proposed by Berkeley City Council requiring cell phone retailers to provide information to consumers at the point of sale informing them that if a phone is carried in a pocket or a bra, that it is possible that Federal radiofrequency exposure guidelines will be exceeded. The implications of this decision are being closely monitored by industry, regulators and activists. The CTIA have suggested that the mandate represents ‘a war against science’ and that its members are being conscripted to “utter anti-science views”. For Berkeley, assisted by eminent lawyer Lawrence Lessig, the case was about the public having a ‘right to know’ about what they were purchasing, not the Rf scientific controversy, and that the mandate merely reiterated information consistent with the CTIA’s ‘own science based standards’. The case, will be used as platform to consider the tensions that emerge where legal principles, regulation and science intersect and require translation. Does the mandate leave the public better scientifically informed, or prone to unreasonably amplifying scientific uncertainties? Is the mandate pro or anti- science? It will be suggested, drawing on concepts of legal- deconstruction, civic epistemology and boundary work, that the fit between notions of science, truth, transparency and legal rights, requires an analysis that is sensitive to the social and political context in which these notions are brought together.

Author

• David Mercer, University of Wollongong