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Legal Construction of Public Health Risks (review)

Four years has passed since the pandemics of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) manifested how vulnerable societies can be toward public health risks, and how societies’ safety is intertwined in this global society. Since then, under the auspice of the World Health Organization, governments worldwide have been reviewing their policies and infrastructures, hoping to be better prepared for any future pandemics. Some of these efforts involve statutory revisions, some of them not. Yet, if the legal system in each country represents the infrastructure of how governments can impose coercive powers upon its citizens facing public health risks, how has the law responded to these public health risks? How well have they done? Bringing together six scholars of law, science, and technology, the anthology of “Legal construction of Public Heath Risks” presents a colorful sampler of the diverse possibilities how legal discourse can contribute to the issue. Boldly entitled “Legal construction of Public Health Risks,” the anthology actually talks more about the government more than law, and endeavors to present and critique on how governments perceive public health risk in different issues, how they have responded to it, and how should they respond. As the organizer of the symposium that led toward this anthology, Wen-Tsong Chiou gives a very good introduction in the beginning of this book. Chiou notices that traditionally, at least in Taiwan, the legal academia seems to perceive the law being able only to respond to scientific development passively; paradoxically, the science circle also regard themselves as having no choice but to accept legal regulation passively. Under this vision of law, science, and technology, the law deals with value issues while science pursues objective facts which are value neutral. In response, Chiou raised a Study of Science Technology and Society (STS) question that is only beginning to be inquired in Taiwan’s legal academia: how has science East Asia Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2008) 2:453–455 DOI 10.1007/s12280-008-9059-0