The Biases of Risk Tradeoff Analysis: Towards Parity in Environmental and Health-and-Safety Regulation

Risk tradeoff analysis is in the process of transforming the practice of regulation. Its core idea is simple and intuitively appealing: Regulations undertaken to minimize or eliminate certain health risks often have the perverse effect of promoting other risks. A serious analysis of the impact of a regulation should pay attention not only to its primary effects in reducing the so-called target risk, but also to the secondary effects of the regulation in bringing about ancillary risks. In this way, risk tradeoff analysis promises a more rational technique for the evaluation of regulation. Risk tradeoff analysis, however, focuses exclusively on the negative secondary effects of risk regulation, but systematically ignores the phenomenon of ancillary benefits, the reductions in risk that take place in addition to--and as a direct or indirect result of--reductions in the target risk. The resulting conclusions are therefore consistently biased against regulation. This methodological bias is, in turn, reinforced by an institutional bias that emerges when risk tradeoff analysis is applied in the administrative state. Agency inattention to ancillary effects gives rise to iterative processes of administrative oversight and judicial review that privilege the opponents of regulation. This Article sheds light on these biases and proposes a solution: ancillary benefit analysis. This technique would direct the attention of administrative decisionmakers to the positive byproducts of regulation designed to promote health, safety, and the environment. At a time when risk tradeoff analysis enjoys ever-growing support in the courts and the academy, this Article proposes an approach through which to counteract its one-sidedness

Field, capital and the policing habitus: nderstanding Bourdieu through The NYPD’s post-9/11 counterterrorism practices

This article extends existing Bourdieusian theory in criminology and security literature through examining the practices of the New York City Police Department in the post-9/11 counterterrorism field. This article makes several original contributions. First, it explores the resilient nature of the policing habitus, extending Bourdieusian criminological findings that habitus are entrenched and difficult to change. Second, this article examines the way the resilient habitus drives subordinate factions to displace dominant factions in a field’s established social hierarchy through boundary-pushing practices, a concept previously unexamined in Bourdieusian criminology. Drawing on original documentary analysis, this article uses the illustrative example of the NYPD’s post-9/11 counterterrorism practices, exploring how it sought to displace the existing social structure by using its aggressive policing habitus and an infusion of ‘War on Terror’ capital to challenge the dominant position of the FBI in the post-9/11 counterterrorism field. The NYPD’s habitus driven counterterrorism practices were novel and unprecedented, creating strain with both the FBI and local communities

Fibrin regulates neutrophil migration in response to interleukin 8, leukotriene B4, tumor necrosis factor, and formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine

We have examined the capacity of four different chemoattractants/cytokines to promote directed migration of polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMN) through three-dimensional gels composed of extracellular matrix proteins. About 20% of PMN migrated through fibrin gels and plasma clots in response to a gradient of interleukin 8 (IL-8) or leukotriene B4 (LTB4). In contrast, < 0.3% of PMN migrated through fibrin gels in response to a gradient of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF) or formyl-methionyl-leucyl-phenylalanine (FMLP). All four chemoattractants stimulated PMN to migrate through gels composed of collagen IV or of basement membrane proteins (Matrigel), or through filters to which fibronectin or fibrinogen had been adsorbed. PMN stimulated with TNF or FMLP adhered and formed zones of close apposition to fibrin, as measured by the exclusion of a 10-kD rhodamine-polyethylene glycol probe from the contact zones between PMN and the underlying fibrin gel. By this measure, IL-8- or LTB4-treated PMN adhered loosely to fibrin, since 10 kD rhodamine-polyethylene glycol permeated into the contact zones between these cells and the underlying fibrin gel. PMN stimulated with FMLP and IL-8, or FMLP and LTB4, exhibited very little migration through fibrin gels, and three times as many of these cells excluded 10 kD rhodamine-polyethylene glycol from their zones of contact with fibrin as PMN stimulated with IL-8 or LTB4 alone. These results show that PMN chemotaxis is regulated by both the nature of the chemoattractant and the composition of the extracellular matrix; they suggest that certain combinations of chemoattractants and matrix proteins may limit leukocyte movements and promote their localization in specific tissues in vivo