56:2 (April 2015) of the journal
Technology and Culture is a special issue, "(Auto)Mobility, Accidents, and Danger." Of special interest for legal historians is
Delegating to the Automobile: Experimenting with Automotive Restraints in the 1970s
(pp. 440-463) by
Jameson M. Wetmore, which is a view, from later in the
twentieth century, of an analogous issue to the one
Sally H. Clarke
addressed in
Unmanageable Risks: MacPherson v. Buick and the Emergence of a Mass Consumer Market,
Law and History Review 23 (2005): 1-52.
Here’s the abstract to Wetmore’s (gated) article:
This article explores the attempts in the United States in the 1970s to implement a new paradigm for automobile safety—crashworthiness, the idea that automobile passengers should be protected in the event of a crash. A large number of strategies were proposed, including air bags, seatbelt modifications, mandatory belt-use laws, and ignition interlocks. Many of these did not initially come to fruition, but they did give the automobile safety community a chance to experiment with different ways of distributing responsibilities between automobile occupants, automobile manufacturers, and, to a lesser extent, government agencies. These experiments helped pave the way for the successful implementation of a number of new strategies in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.
The TOC for the entire issue is
here.
