Write On! Regulating disasters

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.)

"Emergency Regulation under the Threat of a Catastrophe" is the subject of a call for papers from École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Paris, or HEC Paris, since 1881 an international business school based in the French capital.

Prompting the call -- and the HEC Paris workshop at which papers will be presented, on November 10 and 11, 2010: the ash plumes (below right) from an Icelandic volcano that grounded airlines, and thus stranded thousands of spring 2010 travelers in, to, and from Europe. (photo credit)

An informative account of the regional and international regulatory mess this entailed was just published as an ASIL Insight by Alberto Alemanno, an associate professor in business law and taxation at HEC Paris, and a co-organizer of this event.

Here's an excerpt from the full call for papers:

The ash crisis is not the first or the only such problem to have occurred. It is one of a series of recent real or potential catastrophes -- natural disasters, terrorism, pandemics -- that have taken by surprise globalized firms and partly regulators. As such it represents a rich case study in the problem of emergency regulation ....
[W]e propose a workshop with selected speakers and discussants that will retrospectively look at what happened during the worst aviation crisis in European history, and proactively suggest how the lessons learned can affect other regulatory systems which might be faced with similar crises.

Questions that papers might address:

► Roles of science and technology in supporting both risk assessment and decision;

► Institutional design and capability of the regulatory system; and

► Various stakeholders' roles.
Selected papers may be published in the European Journal of Risk Regulation, for which Alemanno serves as Editor-in-Chief, and published in a book to follow.

Submit 300-word abstracts no later than September 15, 2010, to Alemanno at alemanno@hec.fr, or to his co-organizer, Maryland Engineering Professor Emeritus Vincent Brannigan, at firelaw@firelaw.edu.

Further details here.