There is an old but powerful argument for the claim that exhaustive divine foreknowledge is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. A crucial ingredient in this argument is the principle of the “Fixity of the Past”. A seemingly new response to this argument has emerged, the so-called “dependence response,” which involves, among other things, abandoning FP for an alternative principle, the principle of the “Fixity of the Independent”. This paper presents three arguments for the claim that FI ought to (...) be preferred to FP. (shrink)

Who is the 'I' that performs? The arts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have pushed us relentlessly to reconsider our notions of the self, expression, and communication: to ask ourselves, again and again, who we think we are and how we can speak meaningfully to one another. Although in other performing arts studies, especially of theatre, the performance of selfhood and identity continues to be a matter of lively debate in both practice and theory, the question of how a (...) sense of self is manifested through musical performance has been neglected. The authors of 'Voices, Bodies, Practices' are all musician-researchers: the book employs artistic research to explore how embodied performing "voices" can emerge from the interactions of individual performers and composers, musical materials, instruments, mediating technologies, and performance contexts. (shrink)

Revisiting Dawkin’s proposal of memes – a piece of thought copied from person to person – raises the question: can narrative, and by extension narratology, be utilized to explore the ‘infecting’, or transferring agent of cultural ideas, identity and the creation of self? Intriguingly, and perhaps even more relevant to the role of emergent models and the shifting divide between engineered and organic constructions, what role does media play in the fabrication of self? This article proposes to examine various (...) attempts to define modes of being using the formative and delimiting lens of narrative. It will investigate the role of media as the carrier agent for memetic modes of being, and their application in creating and sustaining cultural individuation. Jung’s declarative of the collective unconscious and archetypes, as well as Hofstadter’s loops, a common, but neglected field of enquiry that interrogates how memetic transference begins with the stories we tell, will inform the exploration of narrative as a means to define, delineate and bound the self. (shrink)

Sexual and reproductive health is a challenge worldwide, and much progress is needed to reach the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper presents cross-sectional data collected in Sierra Leone on sexual and gender-based violence, family planning, child, early and forced marriage, and female genital mutilation using an innovative method of measurement: situational judgment tests, as a subset of questions within a larger survey tool. For the SJTs, respondents saw hypothetical scenarios on these themes and had to indicate how they (...) would react. The objective is to give an impression of beliefs and norms on specific behaviors, which provide insights for social and behavior change interventions. Data was collected by enumerators traveling to villages randomly selected in six districts of the country. The sample is composed of 566 respondents. Results show that FGM in particular seem to be a priority topic, in comparison to the other topics for which the norms seem to be stronger against those practices. Age differences emerged and suggest priority groups to be targeted. In terms of validity of the measurement methods, situational judgment test answers correlated positively with other items in the survey, but the magnitude of the association is often small, and sometimes not significant. Thus, more studies are needed to further explore the validity of this measure by comparing against a reference value. Using SJTs could complement other data collection tools to perform community assessment, and orient the direction of the program in its planning phase. (shrink)

Society has historically not taken a benign view of genetic disease. The laws permitting sterilization of the mentally re tarded~ and those proscribing consanguineous marriages are but two examples. Indeed as far back as the 5th-10th centuries, B.C.E., consanguineous unions were outlawed (Leviticus XVIII, 6). Case law has traditionally tended toward the conservative. It is reactive rather than directive, exerting its influence only after an individual or group has sustained injury and brought suit. In contrast, state legislatures have not been (...) inhibited in enacting statutes. Many of their products can be characterized as hasty, unnecessary, ill-conceived, and based on the heart rather than the head. Moreover the lack of expert consultation sought has also been remarkable. One state legislature, for example, has advocated immunization for sickle cell anemia! Many others have enacted laws for the screening of inborn errors of metabolism, e.g., phenylketon uria, but have poorly defined the lines of responsibility to secure compliance. A spate of specific disease-related bills has emerged in the u.S. Congress, each seeking recognition and appropriations. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, Cooley's anemia and Tay-Sachs disease have been among the front-runners for support. Finally, in 1975, Congress has begun to examine an omnibus bill concerning all forms of genetic disease. The bill, termed the National Genetic Diseases Act is, however, still far from being enacted. (shrink)

This study aimed to advance our understanding of 5-year-olds’ behavioral difficulties by modeling and testing both mediational protective and risk pathways simultaneously. Drawing on two national samples from different Western European countries—the United Kingdom and Germany, the proposed model considered observed sensitive parental interactive behaviors and tested child vocabulary as protective pathways connecting parental education with children’s behavioral outcomes; the risk pathways focused on negative parental disciplinary practices linking parental education, parental distress, and children’s difficult temperament to children’s behavioral difficulties. (...) Further, the tested model controlled for families’ income as well as children’s sex and formal child care attendance. Children with comparatively higher educated parents experienced more sensitive interactive behavior, had more advanced vocabulary, and exhibited fewer behavioral difficulties. Children with a comparatively higher level of difficult temperament or with parents who suffered from distress tended to experience more negative disciplinary behavior and exhibited more behavioral difficulties. Additionally, children’s vocabulary skills served as a mechanism mediating the association between parental education and children’s behavioral difficulties. Overall, we found similar patterns of results across the United Kingdom and Germany with both protective and risk pathways contributing simultaneously to children’s behavioral development. The findings suggest that promoting parents’ sensitive interactive behaviors, favorable disciplinary practices, and child’s vocabulary skills have potential for preventing early behavioral difficulties. (shrink)

Many computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency evacuation and egress are now available. However, due to the scarcity of human and social behavioral data, these computational tools rely on assumptions that have been found inconsistent or unrealistic. This paper presents a multi-agent based framework for simulating human and social behavior during emergency evacuation. A prototype system has been developed, which is able to demonstrate some emergent behaviors, such as competitive, queuing, and herding behaviors. For illustration, an (...) example application of the system for safe egress design is provided. (shrink)

We study some aspects of the emergence of _lógos_ from _xáos_ on a basal model of the universe using methods and techniques from algorithmic information and Ramsey theories. Thereby an intrinsic and unusual mixture of meaningful and spurious, emerging laws surfaces. The spurious, emergent laws abound, they can be found almost everywhere. In accord with the ancient Greek theogony one could say that _lógos_, the Gods and the laws of the universe, originate from “the void,„ or from _xáos_, a (...) picture which supports the unresolvable/irreducible lawless hypothesis. The analysis presented in this paper suggests that the “laws„ discovered in science correspond merely to syntactical correlations, are local and not universal. (shrink)

The paper discusses Noordhof' point on emergence, by arguing against an emergentist view of properties.

The paper articulates Deleuze & Guattari’s semiotics towards a semiotic of law through a discussion of the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence and pragmatic semiotics of social power. Within the framework of the pragmatic semiotics, it is argued that the crucial tension is how social machines and their regimes of signs operate with the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence. The signifying regime of the State social machine constructs itself on the excluded foundation of the field of (...) emergence, and what is lost are the real ontological and social conditions of emergence, intensity and affect. In contrast, the counter-signifying regime of the war social machine actively operates with the intensive semiotic of the field of emergence, and develops an image of legality and regime of signs that taps the field of emergence for social organisation and expression. Returning to the issue of emergence and legality, the concept of Emergent Law is developed as a war social machine, abstract machine, assemblage, and regime of signs, that operates a semiotic that is developed in terms of an intensive semiotics that is open to and taps the forces of the field of emergence. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many intriguing questions both in the EU and globally, from the critical task of safeguarding lives to technical legal issues about competences to regulate health as well as the boundaries of emergency laws. This paper is interested in the connection between non-domination theory and the EU’s constitutional structure in the context of emergency laws. A key theme of the paper is that risk and emergencies are nothing new in an EU context, but concepts used by (...) the legislator in a wide range of policy areas which give rise to a number of constitutional challenges. The paper sketches out the main characteristics of non-domination and republication theory and addresses the question of how and why the notion of non-domination may be useful for understanding the EU constitutionalism venture in the framework of risk and emergency laws. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at (...) how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

This book intervenes in contemporary debates about the threat posed to democratic life by political emergencies. Must emergency necessarily enhance and centralize top-down forms of sovereignty? Those who oppose executive branch enhancement often turn instead to law, insisting on the sovereignty of the rule of law or demanding that law rather than force be used to resolve conflicts with enemies. But are these the only options? Or are there more democratic ways to respond to invocations of emergency politics? Looking at (...) how emergencies in the past and present have shaped the development of democracy, Bonnie Honig argues that democracies must resist emergency's pull to focus on life's necessities because these tend to privatize and isolate citizens rather than bring us together on behalf of hopeful futures. Emphasizing the connections between mere life and more life, emergence and emergency, Honig argues that emergencies call us to attend anew to a neglected paradox of democratic politics: that we need good citizens with aspirational ideals to make good politics while we need good politics to infuse citizens with idealism.Honig takes a broad approach to emergency, considering immigration politics, new rights claims, contemporary food politics and the infrastructure of consumption, and the limits of law during the Red Scare of the early twentieth century. Taking its bearings from Moses Mendelssohn, Franz Rosenzweig, and other Jewish thinkers, this is a major contribution to modern thought about the challenges and risks of democratic orientation and action in response to emergency. (shrink)

The better best system account, short BBSA, is a variation on Lewis’s theory of laws. The difference to the latter is that the BBSA suggests that best system analyses can be executed for any fixed set of properties. This affords the possibility to launch system analyses separately for the set of biological properties yielding the set of biological laws, chemical properties yielding chemical laws, and so on for the other special sciences. As such, the BBSA remains silent about possible interrelations (...) between these freestanding sets of laws. In this paper, I explicate an emergence relation between them which preserves the autonomy or novelty of each special science’s laws but also shows their dependence: the autonomy of each level’s generalisations is given because nomicity is conferred to them system intrinsic, their dependence is established via their supervenience on lower level laws. As will be shown, the autonomy of special science laws is further strengthened by their ceteris paribus character. (shrink)

During an emergency, laws serve crucial functions, including clarifying responsibilities, authorizing critical interventions, and protecting vulnerable populations. However, provisions of existing laws designed for normal, non-emergency circumstances may sometimes hinder emergency response efforts, thereby potentially endangering the public's health rather than protecting it. Pursuant to declared states of emergency, disaster, or public health emergency, however, the legal landscape changes in several important ways. Interventions not legally permissible under non-emergency circumstances become available. One key example is authority to temporarily waive legal (...) provisions that may impede emergency response efforts, such as professional licensing requirements, facility capacity limitations, pharmaceutical pedigree obligations, and state contract restrictions, among other laws spanning a host of legal spheres.This article examines the structure and use of waiver authority in emergencies. It provides recent examples of waivers and analyzes potential application to a hypothetical emergency scenario. (shrink)

This article provides an overview of, and thematic justification for, the special issue of the journal of Artificial Intelligence and Law entitled “E-Discovery”. In attempting to define a characteristic “AI & Law” approach to e-discovery, and since a central theme of AI & Law involves computationally modeling legal knowledge, reasoning and decision making, we focus on the theme of representing and reasoning with litigators’ theories or hypotheses about document relevance through a variety of techniques including machine learning. We also identify (...) two emerging techniques for enabling users’ document queries to better express the theories of relevance and connect them to documents: social network analysis and a hypothesis ontology. (shrink)

How can law ethically regulate a future of fast-changing technologies? From recent inventions to science fiction, Future Law explores how law, ethics and regulation must respond to new technologies that challenge the boundaries of our ethics.

This article develops a notion of the ‘politics of time’ in order to analyse the effects that imaginations of future emergencies have in the fields of law and economy. Building on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social time, it focuses on the multiplex temporalities in contemporary society, which are shown to interact differently with the ‘emergency imaginary’. We demonstrate that the apprehension of the future in terms of sudden, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic events reinforces current modes of producing financial futurity, while (...) it undermines the procedural rhythm and retroactive sentencing of liberal law. As a whole, the article supplements the analysis of the ‘politics of truth’ prevalent in the current debate about precaution and pre-emption with a theoretical perspective on social temporality. (shrink)

Despite Kant's explicit statement that every murderer must suffer death, there are at least four situations to be found in Kant's work in which the killing of a human being should not lead to the death penalty: when too many murderers are involved; when a mother kills her illegitimate child; when one duellist kills the other; when one person pushes another off a plank in order to save his life. This paper discusses these situation and concentrates on the last situation (...) - Kant's interpretation of the plank of Carneades – with an eye to what they learn us about Kant understanding of the law. Does Kant acknowledge a legal vacuum? In order to come to a conclusion, Kant's 'solution' of the plank is compared with those suggested by other authors, such as Cicero, Pufendorf and Lon Fuller in his famous 'speluncean explorers' case. (shrink)

If one demystifies entropy the second law of thermodynamics comes out as an emergent property entirely based on the simple dynamic mechanical laws that govern the motion and energies of system parts on a micro-scale. The emergence of the second law is illustrated in this paper through the development of a new, very simple and highly efficient technique to compare time-averaged energies in isolated conservative linear large scale dynamical systems. Entropy is replaced by a notion that is much more (...) transparent and more or less dual called ectropy. Ectropy has been introduced before but we further modify the notion of ectropy such that the unit in which it is expressed becomes the unit of energy. The second law of thermodynamics in terms of ectropy states that ectropy decreases with time on a large enough time-scale and has an absolute minimum equal to zero. Zero ectropy corresponds to energy equipartition. Basically we show that by enlarging the dimension of an isolated conservative linear dynamical system and the dimension of the system parts over which we consider time-averaged energy partition, the tendency towards equipartition increases while equipartition is achieved in the limit. This illustrates that the second law is an emergent property of these systems. Finally from our large scale linear dynamic model we clarify Loschmidt’s paradox concerning the irreversible behavior of ectropy obtained from the reversible dynamic laws that govern motion and energy at the micro-scale. (shrink)

Emerging technologies present a challenging but fascinating set of ethical, legal and regulatory issues. The articles selected for this volume provide a broad overview of the most influential historical and current thinking in this area and show that existing frameworks are often inadequate to address new technologies - such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, synthetic biology and robotics - and innovative new models are needed. This collection brings together invaluable, innovative and often complementary approaches for overcoming the unique challenges of emerging technology (...) ethics and governance. (shrink)

This book examines the relationship between law and scientific advancement, with a particular focus on the theory of evolution and medical innovation. Historically, the law has struggled to keep pace with modern medical advances. The authors demonstrate that the laws that govern human behaviour must evolve in response to such advances."--Provided by publisher.

Although Directive 2001/20/EC of the European Parliament and of Council of 4 April 2001 on the approximation of the laws regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States relating to the implementation of good clinical practice in the conduct of clinical trials on medicinal products for human use does not contain an exception for emergency situations, and requires the informed consent of a legal representative in all cases where research is conducted on legally competent individuals who are unable to give (...) informed consent, in Poland, emergency research can be conducted without consent. Polish regulations on emergency research can hardly be treated as a result of intentional legislative policy. Our provisions arise from multiple and sophisticated interpretations of different regulations that govern medical experiments on human subjects and clinical trials. These interpretations can be summarized as follows: There are two categories of medical experiments: therapeutic and non-therapeutic experiments. Emergency research without consent may be conducted in the category of therapeutic experiment only.. Emergency research may be conducted without consent if there is a situation of great urgency in which the research subject’s life is in danger and there is no possibility of obtaining immediate consent from the research subject him or herself, or from his or her legal representative or guardianship court, and the research subject has not refused to give consent for the participation in an emergency therapeutic experiment. The legal representative or guardianship court shall be provided with all the relevant information concerning subject’s participation in an experiment as soon as possible. All projects of emergency research with intent to be done without the research subject’s consent must be approved by an independent bioethics committee. Because these five requirements seem to provide insufficient protection for a subject’s autonomy and rights it is necessary to add to them two other conditions: the emergency research could not be conducted using other research participants capable of giving informed consent; and informed consent for continued participation in the emergency research shall be obtained from either the participant him or herself or the legally authorized representative as soon as possible. A consolidated single Act that will govern all aspects of medical experiments on human subjects, including emergency research, should be prepared and enacted as soon as possible. (shrink)

Two prominent metaphors in Greek and Roman political philosophy are surveyed here, with a view to determining their possible meanings and the plausibility of the claims advanced by those possible meanings.

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by policymakers and (...) practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.One expert's framing of the mission of public health may help improve understanding of the range of hazards for which to be legally prepared. These hazards include urgent realities — such as chronic disease, injury, disabilities, conventional communicable diseases, and an aging and obese population — and urgent threats, such as pandemic influenza, natural disasters, and terrorism. (shrink)

This paper is one of the four interrelated action agenda papers resulting from the National Summit on Public Health Legal Preparedness convened in June 2007 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and multi-disciplinary partners. Each of the action agenda papers deals with one of the four core elements of legal preparedness: laws and legal authorities; competency in using those laws; coordination of law-based public health actions; and information. Options presented in this paper are for consideration by policymakers and (...) practitioners — in all jurisdictions and all relevant sectors and disciplines — with responsibilities for all-hazards emergency preparedness.One expert's framing of the mission of public health may help improve understanding of the range of hazards for which to be legally prepared. These hazards include urgent realities — such as chronic disease, injury, disabilities, conventional communicable diseases, and an aging and obese population — and urgent threats, such as pandemic influenza, natural disasters, and terrorism. (shrink)

Contrasting accounts of physicalism and strong emergentism face two problems. According to the neutrality problem, contrasting supervenience-based formulations of these positions cannot be neutral with respect to certain unrelated metaphysical commitments. According to the collapse problem, emergent properties can be accounted for using an appropriately expansive physical ontology, rendering strong emergentism metaphysically suspect. I argue that both these problems can be solved with a principled distinction between emergent causal laws and physical laws. I propose such a distinction based (...) on a finite discontinuity in the behavior of fundamental physical constituents as a function of complexity. (shrink)

Dyzenhaus deals with the urgent question of how governments should respond to emergencies and terrorism by exploring the idea that there is an unwritten constitution of law, exemplified in the common law constitution of Commonwealth countries. He looks mainly to cases decided in the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada to demonstrate that even in the absence of an entrenched bill of rights, the law provides a moral resource that can inform a rule-of-law project capable of responding to situations which place (...) legal and political order under great stress. Those cases are discussed against a backdrop of recent writing and judicial decisions in the United States of America in order to show that the issues are not confined to the Commonwealth. The author argues that the rule-of-law project is one in which judges play an important role, but which also requires the participation of the legislature and the executive. (shrink)

As regards the emergence of a European private law in our time, this article shows that lessons can be learnt from the history of unification of regionally defined private law in the German Confederation (1815–1866). An important lesson is that the Europeanization of private law will be anything but a spontaneous process. Moreover, like the members of the German Confederation almost 200 years ago, the members of the current European Union will not have an equal say in the debate about (...) unification of private law. Now, as then, economic interdependencies between the respective members will come into play. That is to say, the members the economies of which are relatively less dependent upon the economies of other members than vice versa are poised to have a larger say in the debate. (shrink)

From their relative obscurity over the past three decades, varied strains of Ebola disease have emerged as a substantial global biothreat. The current outbreak of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to infect tens of thousands of people before being brought under control. Some estimate the outbreak could exceed 100,000 cases and extend another 12-18 months. Ebola’s spread has the potential to extend across the globe, but is concentrated in several African countries. Collectively, these countries are home (...) to nearly 290 million people. Among Liberia’s population of 4.1 million, over 1,100 people have already died from Ebola in less than 6 months; by comparison, if this same outbreak and death rate occurred in the United States, over 88,000 Americans would perish. (shrink)

From their relative obscurity over the past three decades, varied strains of Ebola disease have emerged as a substantial global biothreat. The current outbreak of Ebola, beginning in March 2014 in Guinea, is projected to infect tens of thousands of people before being brought under control. Some estimate the outbreak could exceed 100,000 cases and extend another 12-18 months. Ebola’s spread has the potential to extend across the globe, but is concentrated in several African countries. Collectively, these countries are home (...) to nearly 290 million people. Among Liberia’s population of 4.1 million, over 1,100 people have already died from Ebola in less than 6 months; by comparison, if this same outbreak and death rate occurred in the United States, over 88,000 Americans would perish. (shrink)

The European Union's interest in developing rules concerning maritime law and liabilities has gained momentum, particularly after the Erika disaster in 1999. The development of EU maritime law has taken place on an incremental basis and to a large extent it is closely associated with various EU institutions' knee‐jerk reaction to pollution disasters within EU waters, prompted, no doubt, by the extensive media coverage of public outrage following such oil spills. This chapter considers several relevant EU directives and regulations devised (...) particularly since the mid‐2000s, with a view to evaluating the effectiveness of these measures in achieving a uniform marine legal regime within the European Union in harmony with the international law. A new trend within the European Union is to incorporate provisions of international conventions into the EU legal order by duplicating them in EU directives and regulations. (shrink)

Contract law doctrines can be ranged along various spectra. One of these spectra runs from the static to the dynamic. A contract law doctrine lies at the static pole of this spectrum if its application turns entirely on what occurred at the moment in time when a contract was formed. A contract law doctrine lies at the dynamic pole if its application turns in significant part on a moving stream of events that precede, follow, or constitute the formation of a (...) contract. Another spectrum runs from the binary to the multifaceted. Contract law doctrines are binary if they organize the experience within their scope into only two categories. Contract law doctrines are multifaceted if they organize the experience within their scope into several categories, including one or more intermediate categories. Classical contract law was a rigid, rather than a supple, instrument. Its rules were often responsive to neither the actual objectives of the parties, the actual facts and circumstances of the partiesâ transaction, nor the dynamic character of contracts. Instead, the rules of classical contract law were centered on a single moment in time, the moment of contract formation. accordingly, classical contract law doctrines were almost wholly static and also tended to be binary. The twentieth century witnessed the development of a modern contract law that has largely overthrown classical contract law. This overthrow has occurred in two ways. To begin with, in many cases modern contract law has reversed or fundamentally modified the rules of classical contract law. More important than the overthrow of specific rules of classical contract law, however, has been the overthrow of the deep structure of classical contract law. Where classical contract law had an overriding preference for rules that were objective and standardized, modern contract law has been highly flexible in adopting rules that are individualized and even subjective. Where classical contract law rules were typically binary, modern contract law rules are often multifaceted. Finally, where classical contract law was largely static, modern contact law is, in large part, dynamic. So, for example, static rules of interpretation have been replaced by dynamic rules that take into account events before and after the moment of contract formation; the static legal-duty rule has withered almost completely away, to be largely replaced by a dynamic modification regime that takes into account the value of ongoing reciprocity; a static judicial review of liquidated damages provisions is giving way to a dynamic review that takes account of the actual loss; and static offer-and-acceptance rules have been replaced by dynamic rules, such as the duty to negotiate in good faith. (shrink)

In the current article and contrary to a widespread assumption, I argue that Humeanism and ontological emergence can peacefully coexist. Such a coexistence can be established by reviving elements of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science, in which an idiosyncratic account of diachronic emergence is associated with extensions of the Humean mosaic and the correlative coming into being of new best system laws, which have the peculiarity of being temporally indexed. Incidentally, this reconciliation of Humeanism and emergence allows for conceiving (...) the autonomy of the special sciences in an interesting way, consistently with the reductionist ideal of a unified science. (shrink)

Public health legal preparedness begins with effective legal authorities, and law provides a key foundation for public health practice in the United States. Laws not only create public health agencies and fund them, but also authorize and impose duties upon government to protect the public's health while preserving individual liberties. As a result, law is an essential tool in public health practice and is one element of public health infrastructure, as it defines the systems and relationships within which public health (...) practitioners operate.For purposes of this paper, law can be defined as a rule of conduct derived from federal or state constitutions, statutes, local laws, judicial opinions, administrative rules and regulations, international codes, or other pronouncements by entities authorized to prescribe conduct in a legally binding manner. Public health legal preparedness, a subset of public health preparedness, is defined as attainment of legal benchmarks within a public health system. (shrink)

Public health legal preparedness begins with effective legal authorities, and law provides a key foundation for public health practice in the United States. Laws not only create public health agencies and fund them, but also authorize and impose duties upon government to protect the public's health while preserving individual liberties. As a result, law is an essential tool in public health practice and is one element of public health infrastructure, as it defines the systems and relationships within which public health (...) practitioners operate.For purposes of this paper, law can be defined as a rule of conduct derived from federal or state constitutions, statutes, local laws, judicial opinions, administrative rules and regulations, international codes, or other pronouncements by entities authorized to prescribe conduct in a legally binding manner. Public health legal preparedness, a subset of public health preparedness, is defined as attainment of legal benchmarks within a public health system. (shrink)

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to provide an overview of the legal implications which may be relevant to the ethical aspects of emerging technologies, to explore the existing situation in the area of legal regulation at EU level, and to formulate recommendations for the lawmakers.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis is based on the premise that the law is supposed to invoke moral principles. Speculative findings are formulated on the basis of analyzing specific emerging technologies; empirical findings are based on a research conducted (...) in the whole legal corpus of the EU.FindingsIn the area of network‐based technologies the already existing and elaborated legal frameworks can be used in an extended manner; artificial intelligence‐based technologies call for alterations in several branches of law; while interface technologies show the difficulty and complexity of regulating interdisciplinary fields. The legal implications of emerging technologies have attracted only a minimal legislative attention in the competent bodies of the EU.Originality/valueThe paper provides a systemic approach towards transmitting ethical norms to the application of emerging technologies through legal regulation, and formulates detailed recommendations in various areas of such technologies. (shrink)

Thirty-four states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico have legalized medical cannabis. While no two state medical cannabis programs are alike, public health concerns related to advertising, packaging and labeling, pesticide use, scientific research, and the role of medical cannabis in the opioid crisis are emerging across the country. This article examines these issues, the policy approaches states are adopting to protect patients and the public, and an assessment of the underlying federal legal landscape.

This paper has arisen from my interest in questions ofsubjectivity of primary concern to contemporaryfeminist jurisprudence. Rather than side with anyparticular view represented in the debates surroundingthese questions, I have used Foucault's concept ofepisteme to explore the tradition of feministlegal thought. By focusing upon seventeenth-centurywomen's writings in which the earliest statementslinking law to women's oppression are to be found, thepaper argues that knowledge claims about law'sassociation with women's oppression are predicated notupon the positing of a sovereign feministconsciousness, but upon the (...) specific positivities ofknowledge which existed at the time. Theunderstanding of the birth of the feminist legaldiscourse in terms of the specific conditions of itspossibility, although historically contextualised,raises questions about the hitherto seeminglyunassailable adherence to subjectivist epistemologywhich the current feminist engagement with lawmaintains. (shrink)