This is a double welcome: first, to the new interdisciplinary quarterly, Risk, and, second, to papers drawn from its first three issues. In reverse order, the papers were presented at a well-received conference held in Concord, NH in October 1988 -- with financial assistance from the New Hampshire Humanities Council and the Administrative Conference of the United States. Substantive introductions to papers are omitted because each is briefly described in the integrated index.
As, for Risk itself, while future issues will continue to deal with attempts to elaborate and resolve normative issues involved in determining the acceptability of risk, we hope to attract a broad range of papers. We plan to publish essays and research reports -- both empirical and library based -- as well as letters, announcements and book reviews, concerned with reducing net risk and otherwise treating problems common to consumer, environmental, medical and occupational regulation -- as well as to tort litigation.
In short, we seek papers with the widest potential impact for human risk management -- expecting them to be written by a broad professional cross section, including, e.g., physical and social scientists, economists, medical personnel, engineers and philosophers as well as lawyers. More importantly, we will do our best to insure that Risk will be useful to such people as well as understandable to reasonably well educated generalists. We hope that readers are satisfied by the extent to which we meet both goals.
Thanks are due to conference sponsors and to those conferees who provided publishable papers and entrusted their work to a new journal. Thanks are also due to those who have offered encouragement and support, e.g., by furnishing mailing lists, publishing announcements and otherwise spreading the word through various professional networks. We are grateful, too, to people and institutions who have subscribed -- and to Susan Austin and Robert Pomeroy, who helped with proof reading and cite checking.
Finally, I thank Kristin S. Shrader-Frechette, Robert M. Viles, Dean of Franklin Pierce, and Carol Ruh. Without their help and encouragement, Risk would never have seen the light of day.