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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Gender, precaution, and DES // Environment, Law & History blog

by Nancy Langston Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors
and the Legacy of DES (Yale UP, 2010)
Environment, Law, and History: Gender, precaution, and DES

"H-Environment recently re-posted a 2012 roundtable review of Nancy Langston's Toxic Bodies: Hormone Disruptors and the Legacy of DES (Yale UP, 2010), with comments by Jacob Darwin Hamblin, Mark Hamilton Lytle, Frederick Rowe Davis, Thomas R. Dunlap, and Stephen Bocking, along with an author response.


DES is familiar to law students as the harmful drug that gave rise to the novel tort theory of market-share liability in a 1980 California Supreme Court case, but Langston investigates its deeper history. The drug was banned by the FDA in 1940 based on precautionary thinking, but regulators later reversed themselves and allowed the substance to be used for many purposes, leading to all kinds of harm, including cancer in the daughters of women who took the drug. This is a rich history of toxic-substance regulation, including issues of gender, the history of science, and the precautionary principle.
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