英文摘要 |
While human capacity to manipulate nature has contributed to the reduction of major risks in social life, it has also produced new uncertainty and unprecedented risks that elude current scientific knowledge. Abandoning the dichotomic approach to causal inference, epidemiology with its statistical techniques attempts to characterize and assess the new uncertainty and therefore poses critical challenges to the legal system, which has long relied upon perfect science to proffer a clear answer to dichotomic causation. This paper argues that although the challenges to the legal system are commonly analyzed in three different aspects of public health litigations, including evidence admissibility, burden of proof, and the theory of causation, only when we recognize that even the conception of 'causation in fact' inevitably involves normative decisions and value judgment can we determine properly when the use of a certain kind of causal conception to avoid 'type I error' is justified to serve certain functions of law and when it is indeed more justifiable to accept a conception of proportional causation to serve different legal functions. |