I totally agree; I too was left very concerned after reading his thoughtful and thorough analysis. And I'm really disappointed that (practically) no one on Slashdot took a look at it. Especially after reading his analysis of confirmation bias and so on, the knee-jerk responses on this thread are particularly disheartening.

The law review article upon which the linked story is written is 80 pages long. It is, as best I can tell, totally consistent with known science (it doesn't postulate "black holes destroying the universe" or any such nonsense). It is an attempt to do 3 things:

1. Ask how a court ought to address a science experiment that could, by some very unlikely chance, destroy the earth. He uses LHC as an example, but also suggests Strong AI and nanotechnology as possible future examples.

2. Analyze how a non-expert court can, or should, evaluate highly technical and possibly controversial scientific claims for and against the safety of a bleeding-edge research project.

3. Analyze how logical or cognitive errors could realistically lead a scientist to accidentally or intentionally understate or mischaracterize the risks of her research.

Anyone on this board droning on about "Shut-up-the-LHC-can't-destroy-the-world" either DRTFA or totally misunderstood it. I will now quote the author:

My motivation in writing is certainly not to engender fear. I have no apprehension to share...

It is part of our 21st Century reality that we must take seriously a number of surreal planetary disaster scenarios. In that sense, the synthetic-black-hole disaster is not unique. For some time now, we have been confronted with the possibility of nuclear war and global climate change. In the future, we may have to remove still more scenarios from the science fiction category and place them on a list of real worries. Someday, we may need to seriously consider catastrophic threats from nanotechnology, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence. Each one of these human-made global disaster scenarios involves incredibly complex questions of science, engineering, and mathematics. Courts must develop tools to deal meaningfully with such complexity. Otherwise, the wildly expanding sphere of human knowledge will overwhelm the institution of the courts and undo the rule of law—just when we need it most.

If he had chosen anthropogenic global climate change as his topic of analysis, I think there would have been a more interesting debate on Slashdot, but apparently any mention of "LHC" in the same breath as "black hole" causes some sort of hysterical allergic reaction in some people.