Southern California Law Review (review)

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 343 Southern California Law Review. Symposium on Law and Technology, vol. 45, no. 2 (Spring 1972). Los Angeles: School of Law, Univer­ sity of Southern California. $4.00. The literature of the law certainly provides much of the social history of technological advance. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, court decisions, agency regulations, law-review ar­ ticles and notes provide in the aggregate much of what we need to know about the issues, conflicts, dislocations, and social adjustments which attend the several stages of technological development and application. However, as highly organized as the literature of the law is for legal purposes, it is not readily useful to the historian or public policy analyst because its structure is based on legal themes or concepts (e.g., torts, property, criminal law) and generally ignores technological themes and their decision processes. In other words, one cannot turn to the law library for a coherent collection of materials on nuclear power or biomedical engineering, but instead must wade through all the thematic areas of the law to identify materials relating to the technology under study. Therefore, the efforts which have been undertaken in recent years by the legal profession to grapple directly with developments in science and technology are few, experimental, and still of limited utility. Nevertheless, the environmental movement and the emerg­ ing and even more fundamental movement for improved social control of science and technology can be expected to foster more frequent and useful efforts and “learning” by the legal profession. This symposium volume deals essentially with (a) the capacity of the law to respond to the side effects of technological advance, and (b) the legal framework which has been or should be constructed around several specific technologies. However, the perspectives offered are incomplete and derive largely from the new demands placed on the legal profession by our rapidly developing environ­ mental awareness. Professor Albert Rosenthal offers a helpful summary of the sources of federal authority to protect the environment; discusses limitations on such authority of a procedural, substantive, and politi­ cal nature; outlines the modes of authority implementation and points of application to environmentally damaging processes; and considers several economic stratagems. The orientation is strictly environmental, and many aspects of federal authority which are of direct relevance to the control of technology or to nonenvironmerital impacts of technology are ignored —for example, consumer protec­ tion, corporate responsibility, agency decision processes for research and demonstration funding, and the patent system. Similarly, Professor Christopher Stone presents an analysis of the potential of the law for protecting the environment. His article is 344 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE primarily a creative proposal to endow environmental entities (bod­ ies of water, forests, etc.) with new, enforceable legal rights, similar to those enjoyed by humans and economic institutions such as the corporation. Once again, there is something here to be gleaned for an understanding of how the legal system can respond to tech­ nologically induced problems, but the environmental focus results in an incomplete treatment of this potential for legal response to tech­ nological developments. The other three major articles focus on specific technological developments and their present or potential legal frameworks. As such, they provide more discrete but more useful treatments of technology and the law. Tarlock, Tippy, and Francis present a lucid and coherent study of the social control structure for the differing modes of energy technology, as this structure has established siting as the nexus for control. Their focus on federal and state decision making to regulate a wide array of social and environmental impacts provides a major contribution to the literature on energy generation as a social and environmental problem. Oppenheimer and Lambright present a case study of how weather-modification technology has brought about increasing public sector concern and numerous studies by experts and governmental officials, which will eventually determine public policy. Of particular interest is their treatment of the practices of environmental and technology assessments and po­ tential uses in decision making. Finally, in an excellent and most disturbing study, Roy Spece discusses the increasing uses of tech­ nology (drugs, surgery, etc.) to intervene in the brain functions of the institutionalized (i.e., mental patients

Agency (philosophy) · Criminal law · Environmental law · Legal profession · Legislation · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Law · Legal Systems and Judicial Processes · Space exploration and regulation