Two Background and Research Design
1. National Bureau of Standards, Standards Activities of Organizations in the United States, NBS Special Publication 681, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1984), 1. [BACK]
2. Paul B. W. Miller and Rodney Redding, The FASB: The People, the Process, and the Politics (Homewood, Ill.: Irwin, 1986), 20. [BACK]
3. American National Standards Institute, 1984-85 Catalog of American National Standards for Safety and Health (New York: ANSI, 1984). [BACK]
4. For a description of these organizations, see National Bureau of Standards, Standards Activities of Organizations in the United States, 87-88 (ASAE), 92-93 (ASHRAE), and 93 (ASLE). [BACK]
5. The FTC formally initiated an inquiry into private standards-setting organizations in 1974, two years after the staff recommended regulation to prevent trade restraints and consumer deception (FTC, "Preliminary Staff Study (Precis): Self-Regulation—Product Standardization, Certification, and Seals of Approval" [mimeographed, 1972]). The staff later proposed a rule that would mandate extensive procedural protections, including an appeals procedure, and require standards-setters to meet a substantive "fairness" criterion (FTC, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Standards and Certification: Proposed Rule and Staff Report [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1978]). The subsequent proceedings on the proposed rule were controversial and divisive. Over twelve weeks of hearings, the staff heard from over two hundred witnesses. The FTC Improvements Act of 1980 removed Commission authority to issue a rule regarding standards and certification under section 18 of the FTC Act, concerning "unfair and deceptive acts or practices" (15 U.S.C. sec. 57a). The FTC proceeded with the Standards and Certification proceedings under section 6(g) of the FTC Act, the "unfair methods of competition" provision. The staff eventually recommended against a regulation, favoring case-by-case enforcement against unfair methods of competition (FTC, Bureau of Consumer Protection, Standards and Certification: Final Staff Report, [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983]). [BACK]
6. For example, a recent dispute over which trade association had jurisdiction to certify log-splitting equipment had little to do with actual safety. Rather, the dispute, according to several members of the Board of Standards of Review, stemmed from the income that would be generated through this service. [BACK]
7. Barry I. Castleman and Grace E. Ziem, "Corporate Influence on Threshold Limit Values," American Journal of Industrial Medicine 13 (1988): 531. [BACK]
8. ASME subcommittees provide approximately twenty thousand interpretations of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code every year. The case, American Society of Mechanical Engineers v. Hydrolevel Corp., 456 U.S. 5556 (1982), involved an unauthorized and blatantly anticompetitive interpretation of the code by two subcommittee members who were direct competitors of Hydrolevel, a valve manufacturer. After an "unofficial" letter on ASME stationery warned that the Hydrolevel valve might be unsafe, the firm lost sales and eventually went bankrupt. For a detailed discussion of the facts in Hydrolevel, see Charles W. Beardsley, "The Hydrolevel Case: A Retrospective," Fire Journal, May 1985. The decision was strongly criticized. See, for example, William J. Curran Ill, "Volunteers ... Not Profiteers: The Hydrolevel Myth," Catholic University Law Review 33 (1983): 147. [BACK]
9. Chap. 21, Code of Federal Regulations, subchap. F. The estimate of the number of actual standards is from National Bureau of Standards, Standards Activities of Organizations in the United States, 451. [BACK]
10. See, generally, Richard B. Stewart, "The Reformation of American Administrative Law," Harvard Law Review 88, no. 8 (June 1975): 1667-1813. [BACK]
11. National Bureau of Standards, Standards Activities of Organizations in the United States, 1. [BACK]
12. For example, the Refrigerator Safety Act, the Flammable Fabrics Act, and the Poison Prevention Packaging Act. [BACK]
13. Eads and Reuter, Designing Safer Products, 2. [BACK]
14. See Udo Staber and Howard Aldrich, "Trade Association Stability and Public Policy" (Paper prepared for the Albany Conference on Organization Theory and Public Policy, SUNY-Albany, April 1-2, 1982). [BACK]
15. See John Bart Sevart and R. Lewis Hull, Power Lawn Mowers: An Unreasonably Dangerous Product (Durham, N.C.: Institute for Product Safety, 1982), and sources cited in the extensive bibliography at 195-207. [BACK]
16. For example, two of the first safety standards developed by the agency were for—of all things—matchbook covers and swimming pool slides. Both standards were overturned in court. See, generally, Theresa M. Schwartz, "The Consumer Product Safety Commission: A Flawed Product of the Consumer Decade," The George Washington Law Review 51, no. 1 (November 1982): 32-95. [BACK]
17. W. Kip Viscusi, Regulating Consumer Product Safety (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1984), 106-8. [BACK]
18. The article, which was about product testing in general, noted that "without question, UL's efforts have been a major force in preventing electric shocks and fires" but added, on the basis of a few "horror stories," that UL's record is "checkered" (Mark Dowie et al., "The Illusion of Safety," Mother Jones, July 1982, 35). The criticism is mild, particularly for this publication, making UL's response—a staff member referred to it as "disastrous"—as revealing as the article. [BACK]