Qualifications, Weight of Opinion, Peer Review and Methodology: A Framework for Understanding the Evaluation of Science in Merits Review

摘要

The past two decades in Australia have witnessed an explosion of government regulation concerning the protection of the environment and human health. With such regulation invariably rooted in scientific expertise, science now permeates almost every aspect of administrative and legal decision-making of this nature. However, analysis of the interaction between science and merits review-an important forum for challenging environmental and human health decisions in Australia-remains strangely lacking. This article seeks to shed light on this complex and little explored area of law by proposing a framework for understanding how merits review bodies evaluate science in practice. By mapping the treatment of science and scientific uncertainty in four case studies, this article posits that merits review bodies adopt four approaches when evaluating scientific reliability: the Qualifications, Weight of Opinion, Peer Review and Methodology Approaches. These four approaches encapsulate the different formal signifiers used by reviewing bodies when evaluating science, being: strong qualifications; weight of scientific opinion; scholarly peer review and sound scientific method. Further, the approaches illustrate how science and scientific uncertainty can be engaged with at different intensities, and that this can lead to different conclusions about scientific reliability.