Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

The question of which scientists are qualified to provide expert guidance in legal controversies is a perennial debate among scholars, judges, and lawyers. Scientists who participate in legal disputes can achieve enormous power and influence, not only over the case at hand but over long-term developments in legal doctrine. While these issues arise in many areas of the law, environmental litigation has been a particularly active site of contestations over epistemic authority. Courts have frequently relied on scientists to understand whether the government is justified in regulating pollution and who may be liable for environmental and public health harms.

This Article provides a historical account of how industry-funded physicists sought to limit the types of environmental knowledge that courts deemed reliable. As federal regulations increased during the 1970s, the business community recruited physicists to represent their interests in legal disputes over pollution control. Harvard professor Richard Wilson was the most prominent physicist to engage in this work for the petroleum and chemical industries, and the Article focuses on his role in shaping the way the Supreme Court evaluated environmental and public health studies. Wilson pioneered a method of understanding threats from toxic chemicals called probabilistic, quantitative risk assessment, which industries hoped would limit pollution regulation. He went on to join forces with prominent conservative organizations like the Atlantic Legal Foundation to assist companies in limiting their liability from toxic chemical exposures. Even though Wilson had no training or expertise in environmental health research, the Supreme Court largely adopted his approach to understanding pollution risks and scientific expertise in several enormously important cases for environmental law, including Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, and General Electric Co. v. Joiner.

Comments

Copyright Digital Commons@DePaul © 2025. Originally published as Rachel Rothschild, Physicists as Environmental Experts, 74 DePaul L. Rev. 587 (2025) Available at: https://via.library.depaul.edu/law-review/vol74/iss2/12

Download


Share

COinS