The question in particular is that the contaminants we're talking about here under CEPA are things to which we are involuntarily exposed. We have no choice at all about the exposure pathway, precisely because they're in the ambient environment. Indeed, with certain vulnerable populations we even find that exposure pathways are different for children, for example.
That's something quite different from a situation in which you have a voluntary consent. However poorly informed your former students may have been, they were still giving their consent, and that I think is a fundamental difference here. It is here that the role of the state becomes important, because as government you're acting as a proxy to try to deal with those situations of involuntary risk and exposure.