1. Rothman, Greenland, and Lash, Modern Epidemiology.
2. There is a live debate as to whether this tendency is healthy. See, inter alia: Kaufman, “Toward a More Disproportionate Epidemiology”; Poole, “On the Origin of Risk Relativism”; Greenland, “Cornfield, Risk Relativism, and Research Synthesis”; Broadbent, Philosophy of Epidemiology, 129–144; Broadbent, “Risk Relativism and Physical Law.” Here, no endorsement is intended; the point is simply that lawyers are very likely to encounter epidemiological evidence presented in the form of relative risks.
3. Szklo and Nieto, Epidemiology: Beyond the Basics, 183–223.
4. Rothman, Greenland, and Lash, Modern Epidemiology, Chapter 5.
5. There is obviously a very large literature on causal inference in epidemiology. Regarding the causal interpretation of measures such as RR, see in particular Broadbent, Philosophy of Epidemiology, Chapter 3. For discussions of epidemiological causal inference in connection with toxic tort litigation, see Thomson, “Causal Inference in Epidemiology: Implications for Toxic Tort Litigation”; Haack, “An Epistemologist Among the Epidemiologists”; Haack, “Proving Causation: The Holism of Warrant and the Atomism of Daubert.” For a selection of literature on causal inference in epidemiology more generally, see inter alia Hill, “The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?”; Holland, “Statistics and Causal Inference”; Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation; Bird, “The Epistemological Function of Hill's Criteria”; Broadbent, “Causal Inference in Epidemiology: Mechanisms, Black Boxes, and Contrasts”; Hernán and Robins, “Causal Inference.”