Proposition 71 and the ability to be objective

Within the opinion from Alameda County Superior Court upholding the constitutionality of Proposition 71 is a line: Merely because a board member derives income from within a given industry, he or she does not lose the ability to be objective, citing to Consumers Union v. California Milk Producers, 82 Cal App 3d 433, 448.

Lawrence Altman, merely discussing the review of papers (not the allocation of money) wrote in the New York Times on May 2, 2006: But the reviewers, called independent experts, in fact are often competitors of the authors of the papers they scrutinize, raising potential conflicts of interest.

Merely because the reviewer is a competitor does not mean the reviewer has lost the capability to be objective, but one worries about conflicting motivations within the reviewer.