Category Archives: Personal Injuries
Basu, Omotubora and Fox, ‘Autonomous delivery robots: a legal framework for infliction of game-theoretic small penalties on pedestrians’
ABSTRACT Autonomous delivery robots (ADRs) must share and negotiate for public and private space with pedestrians. Game theory shows that this requires making credible threats of inflicting at least small harms onto members of the public, which requires new legal justification. To this end, we argue that ADRs could be considered as pedestrians under existing […]
Chen Meng Lam, ‘Revisiting Loss of Chance in Medical Negligence: Employing Public Policy Positively as Justification’
ABSTRACT The loss of chance doctrine in medical negligence has triggered much controversy and debate across jurisdictions. Courts in various jurisdictions including England, Australia, the United States and Singapore have taken differing approaches toward the loss of chance doctrine. Despite the considerable debate surrounding the loss of chance doctrine, the state of law on this […]
‘Disney, Contracts of Adhesion, and Arbitration-Clause Bootstrapping’
Disney is in the news this week, and not in a good way. For the truly awful facts of the case, you can’t do better than Emily Crane’s and Alexandra Steigrad’s reporting in the New York Post here and here. In short, Dr Kanokporn Tangsuan had severe allergies. She ate in a Disney restaurant. She […]
Lawrence Friedman, ‘Work Accidents: A Drama in Three Acts’
In the early 1840s, Nicholas Farwell brought a lawsuit against his employer, the Boston & Worcester Rail Road. Farwell was an ‘engineman’ who earned two dollars a day. One day in 1837, he suffered an accident, was thrown to the ground, and the wheels of a railroad car passed over his right hand and crushed […]
Sandra Hadrowicz, ‘Natural Restitution in a Comparative Legal Perspective’
ABSTRACT Natural restitution is one of the permissible methods for remedying damage in numerous legal orders. However, this form of compensation is much less frequently used in practice than monetary compensation. While monetary compensation is a universally found method of reparation in major legal orders, the issue is more complex when it comes to natural […]
Sara Attinger and others, ‘Addressing the consequences of the corporatization of reproductive medicine’
ABSTRACT In Australia and the UK, commercialization and corporatization of assisted reproductive technologies have created a marketplace of clinics, products, and services. While this has arguably increased choice for patients, ‘choice’, shaped by commercial imperatives may not mean better-quality care. At present, regulation of clinics (including clinic-corporations) and clinicians focuses on the doctor-patient dyad and […]
Weller, Popa, Walsh-Buckley, Cook and Maylea, ‘The Importance of Legal Accountability in Negligence and Mental Health Care’
ABSTRACT Legal accountability in mental health care is increasingly gaining recognition in human rights discourse. Negligence is one accountability mechanism that can provide compensation, but has been criticised for failing to deliver justice. The Mental Health and Wellbeing Act 2022 (Vic), along with immunity provisions for clinicians who act in good faith, have shone the […]
‘Can a Claimant Rely on an EU Directive to Avoid the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013?’
I recently acted in the High Court appeal in Wetherell v Student Loans Company Ltd [2024] EWHC 1443 (KB) which raises some interesting questions about the personal injury landscape after the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013. When the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013 came into force and personal injury claimants could no longer […]
Anthony Sebok, ‘Aaron Twerski: Practical Wisdom at Ground Zero’
ABSTRACT This Article celebrates Professor Aaron Twerski’s ‘practical wisdom’ in crafting a solution (with Jim Henderson) to a problem faced by Judge Alvin Hellerstein in the 9/11 First Responder cases. The problem was that Congress did not include these plaintiffs within the Victims Compensation Fund (‘VCF’) despite there being every reason to suspect that the […]
Marc Ginsberg, ‘The Ultra (and Nearly Ultra) Locality Rules Persist! Why Continue to Ignore Modern Medicine and Contort The Standard of Care?’
ABSTRACT The use of the locality rule to define or modify the medical standard of care is inconsistent with modern medicine. Nevertheless, various states in the US continue to adhere to a locality rule. This paper revisits this topic, about which I have previously written, by focusing on Idaho, Nebraska, Tennessee and Arkansas. The paper […]