Ashgate has recently published the book “Risk Perception, Culture, and Legal Change. A Comparative Study on Food Safety in the Wake of the Mad Cow Crisis”. The study explores the reasons behind the different responses of Europe, Japan and the USA in dealing with BSE, one of the major food safety crises in recent years. Making reference to the most recent advances on risk perception that cognitive and social sciences, such as legal anthropology and sociology of law, have experimented with, the author examines the role that culture plays in addressing the process of legal change. Attention is focused on the regulative frameworks implemented to guarantee the safety of the food chain against the BSE menace and on the liability responses sketched to compensate the victims of mad cow disease, showing how both these elements have been influenced by the cultural context within which they are situated. The author, Matteo Ferrari, is a post-doc fellow in comparative private law at the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Trento.
‘This book is a path-breaking and highly topical study of the cultural contexts of the regulation of safety’, David Nelken, Cardiff University, UK
‘Why have different nations reacted so diversely to “mad cow” disease? Ferrari’s answer is in fact a single, elegant solution to a host of long-standing theoretical puzzles in economics, political science, sociology, and law. His account of culture and risk will provoke debate and deepen insight in all these fields’, Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, USA
Full content list, Preface and Index available here:
