The relationship between science, law and justice has become a pressing issue with US Supreme Court decisions beginning with Daubert v. Merrell-Dow Pharmaceutical. How courts review scientific testimony and its foundation before trial can substantially affect the possibility of justice for persons wrongfully injured by exposure to toxic substances. If courts do not review scientific testimony, they will deny one of the parties the possibility of justice. Even if courts review evidence well, the fact and perception of greater judicial (...) scrutiny increases litigation costs and attorney screening of clients. Mistaken review of scientific evidence can decrease citizen access to the law, increase unfortunate incentives for firms not to test their products, lower deterrence for wrongful conduct and harmful products, and decrease the possibility of justice for citizens injured by toxic substances. This book introduces these issues, reveals the relationships that pose problems, and shows how justice can be denied. (shrink)

We currently live in a world of silent risks caused by invisible agents acting through mechanisms poorly understood. It is not surprising that the resulting harms have led to litigation. Playing a visible role in all these cases is the ‘causation problem’; plaintiffs face sometimes insurmountable hurdles in providing evidence for causation. However, the fact that mechanisms are hidden does not mean that one cannot have reliable evidence and information about them. In this paper I argue that the law has (...) taken an ill‐founded, skeptical stance towards statistical evidence for causation in toxic tort cases, making the task of plaintiffs unjustly difficult. I address two frequently cited skeptical claims about statistical evidence and argue that they are unfounded as applied in tort law. I conclude that the skeptical stance results from a failure to distinguish physical chances from epistemic probabilities, and that such a distinction is necessary if plaintiffs are to have a chance of prevailing. (shrink)

Attempts at quantification turn up in many areas within the modern courtroom, but nowhere more than in the realm of toxic tort law. Evidence, in these cases, is routinely presented in statistical form. The vagueness inherent in phrases such as 'balance of probabilities' and 'more likely than not' is reinterpreted to correspond to precise mathematical values. Standing alone these developments would not be a cause for great concern. But in practice courts and commentators have routinely mixed up incompatible quantities, (...) leading to grave injustice. I argue that these confusions result from an unjustified assumption of universal causal determinism. (shrink)

Attempts at quantification turn up in many areas within the modern courtroom, but nowhere more than in the realm of toxic tort law. Evidence, in these cases, is routinely presented in statistical form. The vagueness inherent in phrases such as 'balance of probabilities' and 'more likely than not' is reinterpreted to correspond to precise mathematical values. Standing alone these developments would not be a cause for great concern. But in practice courts and commentators have routinely mixed up incompatible quantities, (...) leading to grave injustice. I argue that these confusions result from an unjustified assumption of universal causal determinism. (shrink)

Many legal disputes turn on scientific, especially statistical, evidence. Traditionally scientists have accepted only that statistical evidence which satisfies a 95 percent (or 99 percent) rule — that is, only evidence which has less than five percent (or one percent) probability of resulting from chance.The rationale for this rule is the reluctance of scientists to accept anything less than the best-supported new knowledge. The rule reflects the internal needs of scientific practice. However, when uncritically adopted as a rule for admitting (...) legal evidence, the seemingly innocuous 95 percent rule distorts the balance of interests historically protected by the legal system. In particular, plaintiffs in toxic tort and employment discrimination suits are effectively held to a heavier burden of proof in showing that their injuries were more probably than not caused by the defendant's actions. The result is that too many victims of toxic torts or employment discrimination cannot win legal redress for their injuries. (shrink)

In this book, Carl Cranor utilizes material from ethics, philosophy of law, epidemiology, tort law, regulatory law, and risk assessment to argue that the evidentiary standards for science used in the law to control toxics ought to be ...

A world awash in little understood chemicals tragically harms adults and children alike. Laws keep health agencies in the dark about toxicants, slow, well motivated research hampers protections, and strenuous vested opposition exacerbates the harm. How science is used in the tort law can facilitate or frustrate redress of harm. This book recommends better approaches.

ABSTRACT Persons injured as a result of exposure to toxic or carcinogenic substances are seldom able to recover damages from those who are responsible for the exposure. Tort law requires proof of causation, and causation is often unprovable because of long latency periods, because of the relative infrequency of the injuries and because many of the injuries among the exposed population are the result of other factors. A number of proposals for modifying the legal causation requirement to allow those (...) who create hazardous risks to be held liable for the injuries that materialise are considered and found inadequate. A proposal to treat risk exposure itself as an injury for which compensation under private law is possible is also considered and ultimately found incoherent. The paper concludes by arguing for a public law solution, modelled on criminal law, but providing compensation for victims. (shrink)

Le matérialisme que ce livre interroge et construit n'est pas une « philosophie », mais la condition de possibilité et l'outil de la connaissance objective. Historiquement, il se confond, de fait, avec l'élaboration de la science moderne s'affranchissant graduellement des contrats de parole qui l'asservirent longtemps à la métaphysique et à la théologie. Comment cette émancipation s'est-elle effectuée en des temps où une croyance instituée dictait sa loi théologico-politique aux efforts de la connaissance en leur imposant a priori la limite (...) de l'Inconnaissable? Comment d'autre part, face à cet affranchissement toujours inachevé, une métaphysique résiduelle impose-t-elle encore aux artisans de la connaissance objective, sans qu'ils s'en doutent, des cadres, des frontières, des démarches et des représentations? Ce livre montre qu'une analyse savante des complexes de discours dans l'histoire, à travers ce qu'elle explique du passé, peut permettre de comprendre et d'améliorer ce qui constitue proprement aujourd'hui l'acte de connaître. De redéfinir la « conscience ». De sortir des leitmotivs exténués sur le « hasard ». De penser plus authentiquement la singularité émergente du vivant. De s'éloigner d'un modèle strictement nécessitariste du « déterminisme ». De sortir des impasses avérées du réductionnisme. De résoudre les contradictions tacitement acceptées entre matérialisme et morale, ou entre déterminisme et conduites autonomes. D'entrevoir l'origine du symbolisme. De comprendre la nature originellement et fondamentalement politique de la religion. De penser l'articulation évolutive entre « nature » et « civilisation », et un lien cohérent et critique entre sciences de la nature et sciences de la société. D'identifier les comportements discursifs récurrents de ce que l'on nomme l'« idéologie ». Et d'édifier sur de nouvelles bases une histoire naturelle et sociale de la liberté. Revenant sur une part essentielle de son oeuvre, Patrick Tort invite ici à une véritable réforme logique de l'initiative de connaissance, et, simultanément, à instruire la méthode capable d'éclairer les mécanismes qui la favorisent et la combattent dans l'univers infini des discours. (shrink)

In order to leave our debate open, it is important to end with a potentially crucial encounter between two domains whose representatives have not yet engaged in direct dialogue. Epistemology and anthropology, indeed, have many ideas to exchange and interactions to stimulate, particularly insofar as both of them consider the relations between a science of nature and a science of humankind.

Patrick Tort, An lntroduction to Darwininian Anthopology. An lnterview with Georges Guille-Escuret. - Recalling how his book La pensée hiérarchique et l’evolution had, in 1983, reoriented the field of the interpretation of Darwinism, P. Tort contrasts “social Darwinism”- which was wrongly thought to be its consequence -with the very different truth represented by the anthropology of Darwin, which opens new perspectives for reflexion on the nature/culture and nature/society relationships. For over a century, this truth was not perceived, not even by (...) Marx and Engels. The selft-eliminating process of selection which takes place within “civilized” societies, is calles by P. Tort the reversive effect of evolution. The method used in this work -the analysis of discursive complexes- should make is possible, through its later developments, to resolve, notedly in matters of classification, a certain numbers of key problems that have been raised by the traditional or estructuralist approaches to the “history of ideas”. (shrink)

How « the Father » became the cause of the pathologies affecting the family. When, in the 1960s, fathers lost their control over procreation and their control over women and children, some cracks started to appear in the edifice of patriarchal domination. There followed a reaction in which all the disorders today troubling the order of the family came to be traced back to this eclipse of the father figure. From this there emerged a veritable « State psychological apparatus » (...) whose aim was the sanctification of the traditional domestic functions : the father as the figure of authority, the mother as carer. Indifferent to its social and historical dimensions, Oedipus assumed the status of a, presumably universal, « symbolic order », dominated by the father and master. MT here calls into question the entire conceptual order of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan : the idea that the foundation of power and reason is naturally a masculine prerogative. Above all else, the article calls into question the interpretation put forward by Pierre Legendre, which assigns to a (patriarchal) juridical order the task of structuring the psyche. (shrink)

Contemporary bio-ethics shares with the ancient tradition of natural theology the characteristic of assuming, in the face of the advances of a fundamentally materialist science, an opportunistic function, which is that of the adaptive rescue of spiritual values. Bioethical humanism exists only in the process of this perpetual movement of repossession, and its effort, established to this effect, leads back incoherently to the interminable dualistic confrontation between science and conscience, having failed to take upon itself the task of constructing a (...) rationally-informed thinking on the relationships between the order of development of positive knowledge and the order of development of moral feelings, both in human evolution and in the history of societies. These matters hardly concern today's fashionable philosophers, whose dominant preoccupation seems to be to find a still-unfilled job - something between an esoteric magus and a preacher in vogue - on the great stage of the inessential upon which inconsequential thought is exhibited. (shrink)

A partir del trabajo de campo realizado con el alumnado de educación secundaria del proyecto I+D “Demoskole: Democracia, participación y educación inclusiva en los centros de secundaria”, el presente artículo, en primer lugar, describe el concepto de democracia escolar, para en segundo lugar, dar a conocer qué es y cómo se concibe un centro de educación secundaria democrático a partir del reconocimiento del papel del alumnado.

El presente artículo propone un análisis sobre el impacto del movimiento feminista universitario nucleado en la Red Interuniversitaria por la Igualdad de Género y contra las Violencias (RUGE), del Consejo Interuniversitario Nacional (CIN), en el sistema universitario argentino. Para ello se trabajó con datos cuantitativos provenientes de un diagnóstico sobre la implementación de políticas de género en las instituciones universitarias realizado por la RUGE en 2020. El diagnóstico relevó información de 60 universidades nacionales y provinciales sobre políticas de género y (...) las acciones colectivas para llegar a producir e implementar esas políticas. En relación con los resultados, observamos que el movimiento feminista universitario, en pocos años, pudo generar cambios en las instituciones de educación superior promoviendo protocolos de actuación frente a situaciones de discriminación y violencia de género, capacitaciones sobre la temática en el marco de la “Ley Micaela” y espacios institucionales para garantizar las políticas de género. No obstante, también se detectaron obstáculos relevantes para el crecimiento y promoción de las políticas de género que se podrían traducir en los futuros desafíos de las feministas universitarias. (shrink)

BackgroundSex and gender differences are often overlooked in research design, study implementation and scientific reporting, as well as in general science communication. This oversight limits the generalizability of research findings and their applicability to clinical practice, in particular for women but also for men. This article describes the rationale for an international set of guidelines to encourage a more systematic approach to the reporting of sex and gender in research across disciplines.MethodsA panel of 13 experts representing nine countries developed the (...) guidelines through a series of teleconferences, conference presentations and a 2-day workshop. An internet survey of 716 journal editors, scientists and other members of the international publishing community was conducted as well as a literature search on sex and gender policies in scientific publishing.ResultsThe Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines are a comprehensive procedure for reporting of sex and gender information in study design, data analyses, results and interpretation of findings.ConclusionsThe SAGER guidelines are designed primarily to guide authors in preparing their manuscripts, but they are also useful for editors, as gatekeepers of science, to integrate assessment of sex and gender into all manuscripts as an integral part of the editorial process. (shrink)

Background Euthanasia is a controversial practice in many countries. Since Spain’s Euthanasia Law came into effect on March 24, 2021, healthcare providers have faced a new challenge since they must inform patients, provide care, accompany them, and implement the law. It also represents a new stumbling block at universities, which must adapt to regulatory changes and educate future professionals accordingly. Little is known about the attitude of nursing students in Spain toward euthanasia since this law was implemented. Objective This study (...) aims to answer the following research questions: What is the attitude of nursing students toward euthanasia? What factors influence this attitude? Research design A cross-sectional study was conducted using an online questionnaire. Participants and research context The study population comprised all nursing students at a public university in Barcelona ( n = 444), Spain, during the 2022–2023 academic year. The validated Spanish version of the Euthanasia Attitude Scale was employed. A bivariate analysis was performed. Ethical considerations The university Ethics Committee (CEEAH 6247) approved this study. All participating students signed an informed consent form. Participation was voluntary, and data anonymity and confidentiality were guaranteed. Results Two hundred and forty-four nursing students responded to the questionnaire. The mean total score was 79.64. Participants with religious beliefs presented lower scores, indicating a more negative attitude toward euthanasia. Participants in their second, third, or fourth year of the nursing degree scored higher, demonstrating a more positive attitude. Conclusions The attitude of nursing students toward euthanasia was remarkably positive. Working on ethical content during the degree course and clinical practice are factors that help to develop a more positive attitude. In addition, nursing education should encourage professional aspects to prevail over religious beliefs in euthanasia situations. (shrink)

This article offers arefutation of the corrective justiceinterpretation of tort law – the view that itis essentially a system of corrective justice. It introduces a distinction between primary andsecondary tort duties and claims that tort lawis best understood as the union of its primaryand secondary duties. It then advances twoindependent criticisms of the correctivejustice interpretation. The article firstargues that primary tort duties have nothingfundamentally to do with corrective justice andthat, if one understands what is meant by``primary tort duties,'' one is (...) compelledto regard this fact as a decisive objection tothe corrective justice interpretation. Second,it argues that, whatever relation thereis between secondary tort duties and correctivejustice, that relation also holds betweencorrective justice and secondary duties ofother legal branches. In sum, the concept ofcorrective justice is neither capable ofunifying tort law nor of demarcating it fromother legal branches.The article also offers a general alternativeinterpretation of tort law. Rather thanbeing essentially corrective, tort law isessentially protective. Under this picture, iftort law has a most important point, it is theprotection of legal subjects and valuablesocial interests from harm. This is theoverarching ambition that unifies primary andsecondary tort duties. It does not, however,demarcate tort law from other legal branches. (shrink)

El objetivo del estudio es averiguar el grado de conocimientos previos sobre los ODS y la Agenda 2030 de los discentes en formación inicial docente para los Grados de Maestro en Educación Primaria, Maestro en Educación Infantil y Máster en Educación Secundaria de la Universitat de València. Para ello, dentro del marco de un proyecto de Innovación Docente, se administró a los participantes un inventario de conocimientos previos. Finalmente, los resultados fueron analizados y comparados con el objetivo de mejorar futuras (...) intervenciones sobre sostenibilidad e innovación curricular. (shrink)

IntroductionTranscranial magnetic stimulation is a consolidated procedure for the treatment of depression, with several meta-analyses demonstrating its efficacy. Theta-burst stimulation is a modification of TMS with similar efficacy and shorter session duration. The geriatric population has many comorbidities and a high prevalence of depression, but few clinical trials are conducted specifically for this age group. TBS could be an option in this population, offering the advantages of few side effects and no pharmacological interactions. Therefore, our aim is to investigate the (...) efficacy of TBS in geriatric depression.Clinical trial registration[https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/], identifier [NCT04842929]. (shrink)

It could be argued that tort law is failing, and arguably an example of this failure is the recent public liability and insurance (‘PL&I’) crisis. A number of solutions have been proposed, but ultimately the chosen solution should address whatever we take to be the cause of this failure. On one account, the PL&I crisis is a result of an unwarranted expansion of the scope of tort law. Proponents of this position sometimes argue that the duty of care owed by (...) defendants to plaintiffs has expanded beyond reasonable levels, such that parties who were not really responsible for another’s misfortune are successfully sued, while those who really were to blame get away without taking any responsibility. However people should take responsibility for their actions, and the only likely consequence of allowing them to shirk it is that they and others will be less likely to exercise due care in the future, since the deterrents of liability and of no compensation for accidentally self-imposed losses will not be there. Others also argue that this expansion is not warranted because it is inappropriately fueled by ‘deep pocket’ considerations rather than by considerations of fault. They argue that the presence of liability insurance sways the judiciary to award damages against defendants since they know that insurers, and not the defendant personally, will pay for it in the end anyway. But although it may seem that no real person has to bear these burdens when they are imposed onto insurers, in reality all of society bears them collectively when insurers are forced to hike their premiums to cover these increasing damages payments. In any case, it seems unfair to force insurers to cover these costs simply because they can afford to do so. If such an expansion is indeed the cause of the PL&I crisis, then a contraction of the scope of tort liability, and a pious return to the fault principle, might remedy the situation. However it could also be argued that inadequate deterrence is the cause of this crisis. On this account the problem would lie not with the tort system’s continued unwarranted expansion, but in the fact that defendants really have been too careless. If prospective injurers were appropriately deterred from engaging in unnecessarily risky activities, then fewer accidents would ever occur in the first place, and this would reduce the need for litigation at its very source. If we take this to be the cause of tort law’s failure then our solution should aim to improve deterrence. Glen Robinson has argued that improved deterrence could be achieved if plaintiffs were allowed to sue defendants for wrongful exposure to ongoing risks of future harm, even in the absence of currently materialized losses. He argues that at least in toxic injury type cases the tortious creation of risk [should be seen as] an appropriate basis of liability, with damages being assessed according to the value of the risk, as an alternative to forcing risk victims to abide the outcome of the event and seek damages only if and when harm materializes. In a sense, Robinson wishes to treat newly-acquired wrongful risks as de-facto wrongful losses, and these are what would be compensated in liability for risk creation (‘LFRC’) cases. Robinson argues that if the extent of damages were fixed to the extent of risk exposure, all detected unreasonable risk creators would be forced to bear the costs of their activities, rather than only those who could be found responsible for another’s injuries ‘on the balance of probabilities’. The incidence of accidents should decrease as a result of improved deterrence, reduce the ‘suing fest’, and so resolve the PL&I crisis. So whilst the first solution involves contracting the scope of tort liability, Robinson’s solution involves an expansion of its scope. However Robinson acknowledges that LFRC seems prima facie incompatible with current tort principles which in the least require the presence of plaintiff losses, defendant fault, and causation to be established before making defendants liable for plaintiffs’ compensation. Since losses would be absent in LFRC cases by definition, the first evidentiary requirement would always be frustrated, and in its absence proof of defendant fault and causation would also seem scant. If such an expansion of tort liability were not supported by current tort principles then it would be no better than proposals to switch accident law across to no-fault, since both solutions would require comprehensive legal reform. However Robinson argues that the above three evidentiary requirements could be met in LFRC cases to the same extent that they are met in other currently accepted cases, and hence that his solution would therefore be preferable to no-fault solutions as it would only require incremental but not comprehensive legal reform. Although I believe that actual losses should be present before allowing plaintiffs to seek compensation, I will not present a positive argument for this conclusion. My aim in this paper is not to debate the relative merits of Robinson’s solution as compared to no-fault solutions, nor to determine which account of the cause of the PL&I crisis is closer to the truth, but rather to find out whether Robinson’s solution would indeed require less radical legal reform than, for example, proposed no-fault solutions. I will argue that Robinson fails to show that current tort principles would support his proposed solution, and hence that his solution is at best on an even footing with no-fault solutions since both would require comprehensive legal reform. (shrink)

In many toxic-tort cases - notably in Oxendine v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc, and in Joiner v. G.E., - plaintiffs argue that the expert testimony they wish to present, though no part of it is sufficient by itself to establish causation "by a preponderance of the evidence," is jointly sufficient to meet this standard of proof; and defendants sometimes argue in response that it is a mistake to imagine that a collection of pieces of weak evidence can be any (...) stronger than its individual components. This article draws on the epistemological theory I first presented in 1993 in Evidence and Inquiry, and then amplified and refined in 2003 in Defending Science - Within Reason. This theory of evidence shows that, under certain conditions, a combination of pieces of evidence none of which is sufficient by itself really can warrant a casual conclusion to a higher degree than any of its components alone. When my account is applied to the very complex congeries of evidence typically proffered to prove general causation in these toxic-tort cases, it improves on the influential "Bradford Hill criteria" for assessing causation; and it suggests answers to questions frequently raised in such cases: e.g., whether epidemiological evidence is essential for proof of causation, and whether such evidence should be excluded if it is not statistically significant. Moreover, the argument of this paper reveals that by obliging courts to screen each item of expert testimony individually for reliability, the atomism implicit in Daubert will sometimes stand in the way of an accurate assessment of the worth of complex causation evidence. (shrink)

These essays by leading scholars illustrate the complexity and range of philosophical issues raised by consideration of law and social justice. The contributors to Law and Social Justice examine such broad foundational issues as instrumentalist versus Kantian conceptions of rights as well as such specific problems as the admissibility or inadmissibility of evidence of causation in toxic tort cases. They consider a variety of subjects, including the implications of deliberative democracy for privacy rights, equality as a principle of distributive (...) justice, the paradox of "moral luck," the treatment of intellectual property in China and its roots in Chinese tradition, and the extent to which initial acquisition of goods yields full property rights. Two special sections at the end of the volume discuss the treatment of law and social justice issues in the work of two philosophers: "Wittgenstein and Legal Theory," on the influence of Wittgenstein's thought on legal philosophy, and a discussion of Jules L. Coleman's The Practice of Principle, which concludes with a contribution, "Facts, Fictions, and the Grounds of Law," by Coleman himself. (shrink)

For years, legal scholars and environmental activists have maintained that traditional tort proof requirements create insurmountable obstacles to recovery for most plaintiffs in chemical exposure cases, be they pharmaceutical suits or environmental toxic tort cases. Generally, tort law requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant owed a duty, that the defendant breached that duty, and that the breach of that duty caused the injury that is the subject of the suit. In some cases those requirements can be relaxed, (...) as for example, when an injury is of a type that does not occur except as a result of negligence. (shrink)

For years, legal scholars and environmental activists have maintained that traditional tort proof requirements create insurmountable obstacles to recovery for most plaintiffs in chemical exposure cases, be they pharmaceutical suits or environmental toxic tort cases. Generally, tort law requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant owed a duty, that the defendant breached that duty, and that the breach of that duty caused the injury that is the subject of the suit. In some cases those requirements can be relaxed, (...) as for example, when an injury is of a type that does not occur except as a result of negligence. (shrink)

For years, legal scholars and environmental activists have maintained that traditional tort proof requirements create insurmountable obstacles to recovery for most plaintiffs in chemical exposure cases, be they pharmaceutical suits or environmental toxic tort cases. Generally, tort law requires a plaintiff to show that the defendant owed a duty, that the defendant breached that duty, and that the breach of that duty caused the injury that is the subject of the suit. In some cases those requirements can be relaxed, (...) as for example, when an injury is of a type that does not occur except as a result of negligence. (shrink)

On Thursday, August 26, 1982 the Manville Corporation and its principle American and Canadian affiliates filed for reorganization under Chapter 11 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Manville's unexpected bankruptcy petition stunned the financial community, surprised Congress, shocked their creditors, suppliers and customers, totally outraged those who have filled damage suits against them and raised a complex tangle of legal, political and ethical issues that will have far reaching implications for millions of Americans. (...) The drama of the Manville announcement stems from the fact that this is the same Manville Corporation which last year earned $60.3 million on sales exceeding $2 billion with an uncumbered net worth of $1.1 billion. This is the same Manville which ranks 181st on the Fortune 500 list of American corporations. And this is the same Manville which has been traditionally included in the 30 companies used to calculate the prestigious Dow Jones industrial average, the most watched indicator of prices on the New York Stock Exchange. While there are many factors in the equation that resulted in Manville's final decision, Manville Chairman John A. McKinney angerly announced that his company could no longer sustain or survive the blitz of toxic torts that it was now facing.Many of Manville critics have claimed that Manville is acting in an immoral and illegal manner. They are held to be immoral insofar as their critics feel that they are using the bankruptcy boom as a means of avoiding just compensation for those who have truly been injured or killed due to excessive or abusive exposure to asbestos. Manville is accused of acting illegally in that the spirit and purpose of the 1978 Bankruptcy Act is being violated because no company has ever filed for Chapter 11 given the size of their assets, their net worth and their yearly sales figures. Other observers suggest that this is much too simplistic a response to the situation and that whatever the final merits of Manville's petition the factors involved in their decision warrant a careful and detailed analysis. (shrink)

This paper presents the first dataset for Japanese Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP), the Japanese Tort-case Dataset (JTD), which features two tasks: tort prediction and its rationale extraction. The rationale extraction task identifies the court’s accepting arguments from alleged arguments by plaintiffs and defendants, which is a novel task in the field. JTD is constructed based on annotated 3477 Japanese Civil Code judgments by 41 legal experts, resulting in 7978 instances with 59,697 of their alleged arguments from the involved parties. Our (...) baseline experiments show the feasibility of the proposed two tasks, and our error analysis by legal experts identifies sources of errors and suggests future directions of the LJP research. (shrink)

This book collects John Gardner's celebrated essays on the theory of private law, alongside two new essays. Together they range across the central puzzles in understanding the significance of outcomes, the role of justice in private law, strict liability, the reasonable person standard, and the role of public policy in tort law.

The last twenty-five years or so of thought about tort law have been remarkably productive and dynamic, as the dominance of the law and economics model has been challenged by theories that reintroduce the language of corrective justice. Over this same time period, theorizing about corrective justice has sprung up in response to a wide range of social, political and moral issues. I have in mind work on restorative theories in criminal justice; on postwar justice; on truth commissions, political reconciliation (...) and transitional justice in contexts of regime change; on official apologies as responses to international crises, institutionalized abuse and historical injustices; and on interpersonal apology, the making of amends, and forgiveness as responses to everyday moral transgressions. In these writings, theorists explore what people owe to one another in the aftermath of various kinds of wrongdoing, and thereby subtly challenge our ideas about what should be included under the heading of corrective justice. One new strand of thought, which appears in many of these debates, suggests that corrective justice requires a form of reconciliation or relational repair. My goal in this chapter is to introduce this idea and explore what it might offer to the philosophy of tort law. (shrink)

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

Toxic speech inflicts individual and group harm, damaging the social fabric upon which we all depend. To understand and combat the harms of toxic speech, philosophers can learn from epidemiology, while epidemiologists can benefit from lessons of philosophy of language. In medicine and public health, research into remedies for toxins pushes in two directions: individual protections (personal actions, avoidances, preventive or reparative tonics) and collective action (specific policies or widespread “inoculations” through which we seek herd immunity). This paper (...) is the beginning of a project of identifying potential inoculations and antidotes to toxic speech. The essay brings a social practice theory of language, with special reliance on language‐games and inferential roles, into conversation with concepts from the study of biologic toxins. Some speech harms are acute while others are chronic and insidious; they have different methods of delivery, come in variable doses, and not everyone is equally susceptible to the power to harm. I argue that of the many kinds of challenges we might issue against toxic speech, challenging its expressive commitments has the greatest potential to stop the damage. The essay explores the different sorts of protections that inoculations and antidotes might offer against discursive toxins and sketches how to imagine these in the practices that govern our speech. The paper does not make policy recommendations, but an epidemiology of discursive toxicity reveals several kinds of “more speech” that might fight against “bad speech.”. (shrink)

The law of torts is concerned with the secondary obligations generated by the infringement of primary rights. This work seeks to show that this apparently simple proposition enables us to understand the law of torts as found in the common law. Using primarily English materials, but drawing heavily upon the law of other common law jurisdictions, Stevens seeks to give an account of the law of torts which relies upon the core material familiar to most students and (...) practitioners with a grasp of the law of torts. This material is drawn together in support of a single argument in a provocative and accessible style, and puts forward a new theoretical model for analysing the law of torts, providing an overarching framework for radically reconceiving the subject. (shrink)

Academics working on military ethics and serving military personnel rarely have opportunities to talk to each other in ways that can inform and illuminate their respective experiences and approaches to the ethics of war. The workshop from which this paper evolved was a rare opportunity to remedy this problem. Our conversations about First Lieutenant (1LT) Portis’s experiences in combat provided a unique chance to explore questions about the relationship between oversight, accountability, and the idea of moral risk in military operations. (...) In this paper, we outline a particular experience of 1LT Portis’s that formed the basis of our discussions, before elucidating the ethical issues this experience raised. In particular, we see 1LT Portis’s experience as, first, illustrative of the problem of moral risk – when military personnel are placed in situations of moral temptation. The problem of moral risk, we propose, is best understood through the framework of the military’s duty of care. Second, we see his experience as highlighting tensions within the dominant moralized warrior model of the military profession. What we call a toxic warrior identity — a distorted form of the moralized warrior identity — can negatively affect the attitudes of military personnel toward rules, policies, procedures, and accountability mechanisms, particularly in relation to non-combat related roles and duties and when leaders must choose between competing bureaucratic demands. We see 1LT Portis’s experience as illustrative of these tensions, yet his experiences also highlight important concerns about the impact of increasing bureaucratic demands on military functioning. In the conclusion, we address the need to balance concerns about toxic warrior identity with legitimate criticisms of overly demanding bureaucracy and suggest avenues for further research on this issue. (shrink)

Medical and public health professionals recommend wearing face masks to combat the spread of the coronavirus disease of 2019. While the majority of people in the United States support wearing face masks as an effective tool to combat COVID-19, a smaller percentage declared the recommendation by public health agencies as a government imposition and an infringement on personal liberty. Social media play a significant role in amplifying public health issues, whereby a minority against the imposition can speak loudly, perhaps using (...) tactics of verbal aggression taking the form of toxic language. We investigated the role that toxicity plays in the online discourse around wearing face masks. Overall, we found tweets including anti-mask hashtags were significantly more likely to use toxic language, while tweets with pro-mask hashtags were somewhat less toxic with the exception of #WearADamnMask. We conclude that the tensions between these two positions raise doubt and uncertainty around the issue, which make it difficult for health communicators to break through the clutter in order to combat the infodemic. Public health agencies and other governmental institutions should monitor toxicity trends on social media in order to better ascertain prevailing sentiment toward their recommendations and then apply these data-driven insights to refine and adapt their risk communication messaging toward mask wearing, vaccine uptake, and other interventions. (shrink)

Tort law and liability insurance have a complex interaction in which each shapes the evolution and effects of the other. This interaction and its many forms and facets in different international contexts must be comprehended to understand fully the ethical responsibilities of liability insurers. This essay builds on previous scholarship on the tort law–liability insurance interaction through a series of observations from the perspective of a global reinsurer. It seeks in part to extend previous analyses of this interaction by also (...) considering issues in the developing world. It seeks to make some normative questions and stances explicit concerning this interaction, as well as to identify some empirical questions that still need to be answered. The responsibility of liability insurers includes ethically shaping the responsibility of others in interaction with tort law in countless diverse situations. (shrink)

Applying a medical conception of toxicity to speech practices, this paper calls for an epidemiology of discursive toxicity. Toxicity highlights the mechanisms by which speech acts and discursive practices can inflict harm, making sense of claims about harms arising from speech devoid of slurs, epithets, or a narrower class I call ‘deeply derogatory terms.’ Further, it highlights the role of uptake and susceptibility, and so suggests a framework for thinking about damage variation. Toxic effects vary depending on one’s epistemic (...) position, access, and authority. An inferentialist account of discursive practice plus a dynamic view of the power of language games offers tools to analyze the toxic power of speech acts. A simple account of language games helps track changes in our discursive practices. Identifying patterns contributes to an epidemiology of toxic speech, which might include tracking increasing use of derogatory terms, us/them dichotomization, terms of isolation, new essentialisms, and more. Using this framework, I analyze some examples of speech already said to be toxic, working with a rough concept of toxicity as poison. Finally, exploring discursive toxicity pushes us to find ways that certain discursive practices might “inoculate” one to absorbing toxic messages, or less metaphorically, block one’s capacity to make toxic inferences, take deontic stances that foster toxicity, etc. (shrink)

Speech is a major vehicle for enacting and enforcing misogyny, so can counter-speech stop the harms of misogynist speech? This paper starts with a discussion of the nature of misogyny, from Dworkin, MacKinnon, and Frye, up to K. Manne’s new work, here emphasizing the ways that women are attacked or undermined through speech and images. Misogyny becomes toxic when it sharply and steadily limits the life prospects, including daily functioning, of the women it targets. To address the questions of (...) counter-speech, one first needs a robust account of language—it’s power, how it functions, whether it can actually be gainsaid. Once the speech act is issued, can its damage be un-done, or substantially mitigated? To answer this, one must understand the kinds of harms that language achieves, and the kinds of counter-speech available. That is, one needs an understanding of how the speech of misogyny functions, rooted in a theory of how language works. This article offers a brief account of language as a complex set of social practices, which includes the speech of law, and an account of the power and limits of counter-speech. I argue that it is unhelpful to think in terms of free speech vs. censorship. Speech is not completely free, and censorship is a blunt tool. Instead, we should look at the ways that discursive harms are enacted and what kinds of normative changes could minimize the frequency of assault, and which changes might minimize the power of misogyny. (shrink)

The law of torts is concerned with the secondary obligations generated by the infringement of primary rights. This work seeks to show that this apparently simple proposition enables us to understand the law of torts as found in the common law. Using primarily English materials, but drawing heavily upon the law of other common law jurisdictions, Stevens seeks to give an account of the law of torts which relies upon the core material familiar to most students and (...) practitioners with a grasp of the law of torts. This material is drawn together in support of a single argument in a provocative and accessible style, and puts forward a new theoretical model for analysing the law of torts, providing an overarching framework for radically reconceiving the subject. (shrink)

Many recent decisions in tort law attempt to combine two conceptually incommensurable features: a traditional 'but for' test of factual causation, and the scientific or medical evidence that is required to explain how some injury occurred. Even when applied to macroscopic objects, the 'but for' test fails to identify causes, because it merely rephrases in the language of possible worlds what may be inferred from what is inductively known about the actual world. Since scientific theories explain the occurrence of events (...) without reference to causes, this test of causation is not only ineffectual but also inapplicable to scientific or medical evidence. Tort law, therefore, should abandon the 'but for' test; when scientific or medical evidence is required in a tort case, the courts should rely on the explanatory strategies that function within the theories from which they borrow such evidence. (shrink)