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Whatever science has to say about risk and sustainable development, ultimately relevant decisions will be taken by political actors. The means they will most often use in order to implement those decisions, however, will be legal (for example, regulations). While law may, therefore, be the point of contact, as it were, between scientific expertise and policy decisions, on the one hand, and the individual or corporate actor, on the other, it can equally appear to be no more than a tool in the hands of more powerful forces and thus low in the list of priorities to be examined in this complex field. Within law, however, there has been increasing discussion in recent years about whether it is actually able to produce the sort of social change that policy actors (and perhaps also scientists) believe that it can. It is, therefore, important to know whether law as it is traditionally understood can deliver what is expected of it and, if not, what sort of adaptations may be required in order to increase the likelihood of success. This paper will begin by briefly reviewing some of the key literature on regulatory failure and consider the ways in which such a problem could serve to exacerbate the risk from seismic events. The paper will then move on to consider a concrete example: the Chernobyl nuclear accident. Although this clearly belongs to the domain of technological rather than seismic risk, it is instructive for present purposes for at least two reasons. Firstly, this was an incident with an impact on a scale comparable to a major seismic event: while it certainly presented a severe challenge in the emergency phase, it has equally stretched scientists, policy makers and regulators in the ongoing rehabilitation phase and exposed many of the shortcomings of traditional regulatory approaches. Secondly, the common political and legal history of the countries affected by this event and many of those in the Black Sea to Caspian region — as former Soviet, transition economies — renders the example particularly pertinent. The people and authorities affected by the Chernobyl nuclear accident have had almost 20 years to consider the shortcomings of traditional approaches. The past decade in particular has seen the emergence of a number of innovations. The final part of this paper will examine these new approaches and consider the extent to which they may offer lessons to scientists, policy makers and regulators concerned with seismic risk. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In comparison with the foundations of probability calculus, the inescapable and controversial issue of how to assign probabilities has only recently become a matter of formal study. The introduction of information as a technical concept was a milestone, but the most promising entropic assignment methods still face unsolved difficulties, manifesting the incompleteness of plausible inference theory. In this paper we examine the situation faced by risk analysts in the critical field of extreme events modelling, where the former difficulties are especially visible, due to scarcity of observational data, the large impact of these phenomena and the obligation to assume professional responsibilities. To respond to the claim for a sound framework to deal with extremes, we propose a metafoundational approach to inference, based on a canon of extramathematical requirements. We highlight their strong moral content, and show how this emphasis in morality, far from being new, is connected with the historic origins of plausible inference. Special attention is paid to the contributions of Caramuel, a contemporary of Pascal, unfortunately ignored in the usual mathematical accounts of probability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethics are the set of moral rules that govern human conduct. Hegel, for his part, asserted that ethicity implied the full realization of freedom, as well as the suppression of it as arbitrariness. In this paper, we point out that, through the relation between Law and Ethics, we can discover how high are the Ethics of a society, as well as the adherence of its members to it. © 2007 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]