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For over a century, changes have been implemented in the way the evidence of adult and child sexual assault complainants is received during the common-law adversarial trial process. Could the fact that reforms have rarely affected the way information is gathered at the initial stages of investigation be a reason why legal systems still struggle with prosecuting sexual offences, but particularly those against children? An abundance of research demonstrates how question types influence the accuracy and detail of reported information. Few studies, however, have focused on the (downstream) impact on legal decisions. This paper begins with a brief overview of reforms to the information-gathering process across the twentieth century that indicate how fraught the issue of information gathering has been; it then reviews contemporary information-gathering strategies and proposes reforms to better align contemporary procedures with sound evidence-based practice. We argue that decision makers, including police, lawyers, clinical and forensic practitioners and judiciary need to better understand the science to bring about overdue change.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, this study examined the level of knowledge and compliance of Malaysian Muslims with the legal decision to distance each prayer by one meter. It is well known in Islam that praying near a congregation (jemaah) is encouraged, but Malaysia's muftis have decided to add a distance of one meter between the prayers to prevent Covid-19 from being transmitted. A questionnaire survey of 560 online respondents was conducted. The data were descriptively analysed to determine the level of knowledge and compliance with the decision. The results show that Malaysian Muslims' level of knowledge and compliance on this issue is very satisfactory.

This article is an examination of human oversight in EU policy for controlling algorithmic systems in automated legal decision making. Despite the shortcomings of human control over complex technical systems, human oversight is advocated as a solution against the risks of increasing reliance on algorithmic tools. For law, human oversight provides an attractive, easily implementable and observable procedural safeguard. However, without awareness of its inherent limitations, human oversight is in danger of becoming a value in itself, an empty procedural shell used as a stand-in justification for algorithmization but failing to provide protection for fundamental rights. By complementing socio-legal analysis with Science and Technology Studies, critical algorithm studies, organization studies and human-computer interaction research, the author explores the importance of keeping the human in the loop and asks what the human element at the core of legal decision making is. Through algorithmization it is made visible how law conceptualises decision making through human actors, personalises legal decision making through the decision-maker’s discretionary power that provides proportionality and common sense, prevents gross miscarriages of justice and establishes the human encounter deemed essential for the feeling of being heard. The analysis demonstrates the necessary human element embedded in legal decision making, against which the meaningfulness of human oversight needs to be examined.

Having to explain a decision has often been found to have a positive effect on the quality of a decision. We aimed to determine whether different accountability requirements for judges (i.e., having to justify their decision or having to explicate their decision) affect evidence use. Those requirements were compared to instructions based on the falsification principle and a control condition. Participants (N = 173) decided on the defendant's guilt in a murder case vignette and explained their decision according to the instructions. The explication and falsification (but not the justification) instructions increased the use of exonerating evidence. There was no significant difference between the groups in guilt perception. The use of exonerating evidence was a significant positive predictor of acquittal rates. The implications for the different forms of instructions in practice are positive, but suggest a difference between the evidence considered and the evidence used to account for the decision.© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is a research direction that was already put under scrutiny, in particular in the AIL those explanations were then judged by legal professionals according to their accuracy. Secondly, the same respondents were asked to give their opinion on the desired qualities of (explainable) artificial intelligence (AI) legal decision system and to present their general understanding of the term XAI. This part was treated as a pilot study for a more pronounced one regarding the lawyer's position on AI, and XAI in particular.

The present study aimed to explore UK intending parent’s reasons for cross-border and domestic surrogacy, their preparations for the birth and the practical and legal challenges faced after the birth. An online survey was completed by 203 participants, of which 132 had a child had born through surrogacy, 33 were in the process of surrogacy and 38 were planning a surrogacy arrangement. The most common reason for pursuing surrogacy in the UK was wanting a relationship with the surrogate (43%, 17) and for the USA it was having a better legal framework (97%, 60). Parents returning to the UK from countries other than USA experienced greater delay and difficulties in obtaining the necessary documents for their return. This study highlights the disparities in parents’ experiences of undergoing surrogacy in different countries, the frustrations some face in obtaining legal parenthood and the feelings of stress and anxiety this may cause. Whilst this is the first study comparing the experiences of people from the UK having surrogacy in different countries, the representativeness of the sample is unknown. The findings are important in identifying future directions for research, including assessing the impact of these early decisions and experiences for later parental wellbeing and children’s welfare.

The Council of Indonesian Ulama (MUI) as an institution of fatwa (legal opinion) making has decided a large number of fatwa in response to religious, social, cultural, economic, and political problems that occurred in Indonesian society to be implemented by Muslims in Indonesia. Usually MUI fatwa is written in a structured document that contains information theorems based on the legal decision methodology regarding the fatwa in question. In this study, we developed a document retrieval system regarding fatwas of MUI. We compared our searching method from the official website of MUI using keywords and results on the document with high relevancy to the keywords. Our solution provides a system that indicates the returns of more documents than the existing one.

Until recently, German laws protecting the human embryo from the moment of conception were some of the strictest internationally. These laws had previously prevented any manipulation of the embryo, such as in preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and continue to affect stem cell research. In 2011, however, the German parliament voted in favour of allowing PGD in specific cases. While the modification in the law in earlier analysis was interpreted as being in keeping with the usual norms in Germany, this article argues instead that the reasoning behind the partial acceptance of PGD, rather than the legal decision itself, is indicative of a sociocultural change that needs to be accredited. Demonstrating that a significant change occurred, this article analyses the arguments that led to the amendment in law: not only has the identity of the embryo been redefined towards a pragmatic concept but the notions of parenting and pregnancy have also changed. The focus on the mother and the moment of birth has given way to a focus on conception and ‘genetic couplehood’. The professional discourse preceding the decision allowing PGD suggested that the rights of the not-yet-implanted embryo should be negotiated with those of the two parents-to-be, a concept that may be called ‘in-vitro pregnancy’.

Many countries involve lay people in legal decision making through jury systems, but critics question the competence of these decision makers in deciding trial outcomes. This chapter discusses the empirical literature examining lay participation in legal decision making, first exploring the mechanisms through which citizens around the globe participate in legal decision making. Then, the chapter reviews the theoretical models of juror and jury decision making, articulating the process jurors use in making decisions and how this translates to the group context of the jury. Next, the chapter turns to research on the competence of juries in making appropriate decisions, comparing decisions made by professional judges and lay people. Last, the chapter identifies new areas of inquiry in the empirical literature regarding lay participation in legal decision making that would benefit from further research.

Recent research has demonstrated that judicial and administrative decisions can be predicted by machine-learning models trained on prior decisions. However, to have any practical application, these predictions must be explainable, which in turn requires modeling a rich set of features. Such approaches face a roadblock if the knowledge engineering required to create these features is not scalable. We present an approach to developing a feature-rich corpus of administrative rulings about domain name disputes, an approach which leverages a small amount of manual annotation and prototypical patterns present in the case documents to automatically extend feature labels to the entire corpus. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we report results from systems trained on this dataset.

This article proved that taking asbaab an nuzuul into consideration , and also paying attention to the social , cultural, and historical background of the revelation, will lead to a more contextual intepretation of the quran. Meanwhile, the method of dragging out the law (istinbaath al hukm) are successively through taking the instruction of Quran, and then Hadist . Personal opinion (ijtihad) is implemented when the law problem is not mentioned in the text (Quran or Hadist). The rise of different religious understanding between PERSIS and other Islamic religious organization was deeply influenced by the different methode of dragging law (istinbaath al hukm), the position of Nasakh-mansukh, the criteria of the Hadist validity, the position of hadist related to the fadlaail, position of asbaab an nuzuul and asbaa al wuruud,. Based on the findingand discussion of this methode of dragging law (istinbaath al jukm) and the Islamic legal decision (fatwa) of PERSIS, it.s proved that PERSIS is one of the Islamic reformation movement s which tends to understand religious text contextually.Copyright (c) 2016 by KARSA. All right reserved DOI: 10.19105/karsa.v24i1.1002

Ethical and legal decision-making are integral components of palliative medicine. The four key principles of Western bioethics are autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence, and justice. In routine palliative care practice, withdrawing unwanted treatment is consistent with the principles of bioethics. Also, physician’s intent is the key to the doctrine of double effect as physicians administer treatments such as opioids for pain. This chapter highlights key topics addressing issues related to ethical and legal decision-making in palliative care including use of surrogates for decision-making, requests for assisted death, informed consent, and privacy concerns. The chapter also considers clinical concerns such as resuscitation status, nutrition and hydration, communication and culture.

Although pregnant women rely on medical interventions to treat and prevent a wide variety of health conditions, they are frequently excluded or underrepresented in clinical research. The resulting dearth of pregnancy-specific evidence to guide clinical decisionmaking routinely exposes pregnant women, and their future offspring, to risk of uncertain harms for uncertain benefits. The two legal factors regularly cited as obstacles to such research are the federal regulatory scheme and fear of liability. This article reveals a far more nuanced and complex view of the legal context. First, legal professionals may—at any time from product conception to marketing—influence decisions about research with pregnant women. Second, factors not previously articulated in the literature may prompt legal professionals to slow or halt such research. They include: financial interests, regulatory ambiguity, obstacles to risk management, and site-specific laws unrelated to research. Any efforts to promote the ethical inclusion of pregnant women in research must acknowledge the role of legal decisionmakers and address their professional concerns.

The open access of citizens to public information is regulated by the Access to Information Act through Law no. 12527 of 18 November 2011, rooted in article 216 of the Constituicao da Republica Federativa do Brasil de 1988: “[...] mudanca de paradigma ao estabelecer que o acesso e a regra e o sigilo, a excecao". Within the judicial branch, the main focus of this project, this is guarded both at local as well as at national level. More verbose explanations are available. This document reports the design of a legal decision support system, for the Brazilian judicial branch, with possible applications to other domains. The main source of data for the system are documents describing the proceedings of lawsuits. We denominate these documents as Legal Event from the Past (LEP) throughout the report. For the development of an early version of the system, or what may be denoted as prototype, we focus on local, i.e., state courts, in a way that enables extensions of the system for processing LEPs regardless of their origin. For comparative purposes, as well as for ensuring scalability of the prototype, several other judicial authorities are considered.

The Patient Preference Predictor (PPP) is intended to improve treatment decision making for incapacitated patients. The PPP would collect information about the treatment preferences of people with different demographic and other characteristics. It could be used to indicate which treatment option an individual patient would be most likely to prefer, based on data about the preferences of people who resemble the patient. The PPP could be incorporated into existing US law governing treatment for incapacitated patients, although it is unclear whether it would be classified as evidence of a specific patient's preferences or those of a reasonable person sharing certain characteristics with the patient. Ethical concerns about the quality and significance of PPP choices could influence legal decision makers' views of the PPP.

Introduction Capacity is assumed to be present unless proven otherwise. Assessments of specific decision-making capacity for financial and legal decisions, although challenging in the general population, becomes almost impossible for individuals with language disorders (i.e. aphasia) in the absence of appropriate communication aids. Several capacity aids exist for the general population; however, it is unclear whether any communication aids exist specifically for the aphasic population to assist assessment of financial and legal decision-making capacity. Method A literature review was conducted of six databases with the assistance of a research librarian. From 171 articles screened, 12 were included in the final review. Results The literature focus was on medical decision-making capacity, and in particular, patient consent. Few articles addressed legal or financial decision-making capacity. Several articles identified the presence of general and specific capacity aids for the general population; however, there was a clear absence of similar communication aids available for the aphasic population with only one communication aid identified to assist with decision-making capacity assessment for healthcare and accommodation decisions only. Conclusion Whilst a significant amount of research has been done on decision-making capacity, it is mostly focused on healthcare; in particular, on patient consent for treatment for the non-aphasic population. Although a communication aid exists to aid assessment of decision-making capacity for healthcare for aphasic individuals, no similar tools exist to aid financial and legal decision-making capacity assessments. This paper highlights an important problem encountered during clinical practice which requires further research.

The latest trend of using athlete endorser social media accounts as advertising mediums has caused apprehension in both the United Kingdom and the United States regarding a consumer’s ability to distinguish advertisements from non-advertisements. Many of the athlete messages are not easily identifiable as marketing communications, and the trepidation is that consumers may be misled by the promotional nature of the messages. As a result, there have been several legal decisions associated with the regulation of the content of an advertiser’s messages through social media and the need for disclosure of the advertiser-endorser relationship to consumers. This article focuses on a legal decision in the United Kingdom against Nike regarding the use of endorsers to distribute marketing communications through social media. The article also discusses the potential legal issues that may occur in the United States and abroad from either non-compliance and/or the misinterpretation of regulations.

It is a rare event that truly reverberates around the world. Geopolitical and financial developments, military actions, earthquakes, tsunamis, and other large-scale natural or manmade calamities are the usual things capable of attracting global attention. One fairly recent legal development has attracted the attention of the entire scientific community and the instrumentation and measurement community possibly more than many others. This event had its origins in an earthquake which struck L'Aquila, Italy, on 6 April 2009. The loss of life and property was considerable, regrettable, and unfortunate. The consequences of a recent legal decision arising from the L'Aquila earthquake are, for most of us involved in the sciences, almost incomprehensible.

Ascorbic acid (C6H8O6), is an organic compound belonging to the family of monosaccharides. It is highly soluble in water, and is often called one of the secrets of the Mediterranean diet. Important is also the spread of its use in the food industry, which has always exploits the ability antioxidants and stabilizers. Many indeed are the additive formulations that take advantage of these properties of ascorbic acid. The purpose of this paper is to explain the characteristics that make ascorbic acid an important food additive and to emphasize the technical and legal issues related to its use in food productions. In particular, in the course of this employment, laws and scientific studies have been applied to the resolution of a lawsuit, having as its object the use of ascorbic acid in preparations of ground beef sold at a butcher shop. The views expressed in court by the technical consultant have led to the acquittal of the accused, in the light of the demonstrated and proven non-toxicity of the molecule and the use of a mixture of additives for the production of sausage. The European and national legislation, supported by numerous scientific studies, define the possible use of ascorbic acid according to the principle of "quantum satis " and it can be used in foods for children. Our work aims to represent further evidence of the safety of use of ascorbic acid as a food additive and as confirmed by this legal decision, he wants to bring out the prospects for use of ascorbic acid for technological purposes even by registered establishments.

We investigated whether American dissertations that were deposited in university libraries or disseminated on microfilm prior to 1978 were "published" for copyright purposes. This question has direct bearing on the copyright status of these works today. In the absence of a directly relevant legal decision to clarify the matter, the authors examined how the former community of practice interpreted the law in the context of dissertation dissemination. A content analysis of written communications by members of this community indicates that both forms of dissertation dissemination were considered to be legal publication under the 1909 Copyright Act.

A recent decision by the Australian High Court means that, unless faculty are bound by an assignment or intellectual property (IP) policy, they may own inventions resulting from their research. Thirty years after its introduction, the US Bayh-Dole Act, which vests ownership of employee inventions in the employer university or research organization, has become a model for commercialization around the world. In Australia, despite recommendations that a Bayh-Dole style regime be adopted, the recent decision in University of Western Australia (UWA) v Gray1 has moved the default legal position in a diametrically opposite direction. A key focus of the debate was whether faculty’s duty to carry out research also encompasses a duty to invent. Late last year, the Full Federal Court confirmed a lower court ruling that it does not, and this year the High Court refused leave to appeal (denied certiorari). Thus, Gray stands as Australia’s most faculty-friendly authority to date.

Not long after computer scientists first began working on the technical design of the network that ultimately became known as the Internet, in 1969, they began to document their discussions, information shared, and decisions made in a series of documents known as the Internet requests for comments that is still being used for this purpose 40 years later. A comprehensive inductive reading of these documents reveals that legal and policy issues were often raised or confronted in the course of resolving technical problems. In many of these instances, the technical decisions that resulted had law-like effects in the sense that they constrained or enabled the ways in which users can communicate and can access and use information over the Internet, whether or not such decisions supported or subverted legal decision-making, and whether or not legal decision-makers understood the societal implications of the technical decisions that were being made. This is one of the two ways in which technical and legal decisio...

PurposeThe purpose of this research is to identify five lessons of the Trinko decision and apply them to internet access issues.Design/methodology/approachThe research identifies five lessons and then relates these lessons to access issues involving the internet.FindingsBased on application of the lessons of Trinko, it is likely that access to the public internet will be maintained but it is uncertain as to what the nature of access requirements will be, if any, for private internets.Originality/valueThe research provides an economic analysis of the milestone legal decision in Trinko and applies the lessons of Trinko to access issues involving the internet.

Nurses doing their task and function need to have a standard to be able to be controlled, to be paid, to be taught, to be applied, and to be a hospital legal decision, thus the arrangement of the standard should be adjusted according to patient and hospital condition. The nursing care standard arrangement with ISDA and ICRM approach will be tested in this study. This study aimed to identify nursing diagnosis with The 6 steps of diagnostic reasoning method, to identify NIC, NOC and to test effectivity of the arranged nursing care standard. Methods: Stage I: identify nursing diagnosis in the six most prevalent cases patients in the ward using the six steps. Stage II: according to the nursing diagnosis that has been identified researcher decides NIC choice using Intan’s Clinical Reasoning Model (ICRM), then selected NOC and NIC be tested its effectivity using t-test analysis. Stage I result shows that using the 6 steps of diagnostic reasoning method in section caesarean patients researcher identifies 13 diagnoses, 9 diagnoses in spontaneous birthing, 7 diagnoses in antepartum hemorrhage, 2 diagnoses in postpartum hemorrhage, 7 diagnoses in preeclampsia/ eclampsia, 4 diagnoses in early amniotic membrane rupture, 36 (94.4%) NOCs identification and 28 (93.3%) NICs are applicative. Meanwhile, on stage II which is to test the nursing care standard effectivity, 16 nursing care standard are effective with p-value

Lay citizens participate as decision makers in the legal systems of many countries. This review describes the different approaches that countries employ to integrate lay decision makers, contrasting in particular the use of juries composed of all citizens with mixed decision-making bodies of lay and law-trained judges. The review discusses research on the benefits and drawbacks of lay legal decision making as well as international support for the use of ordinary citizens as legal decision makers, with an eye to explaining a recent increase in new jury systems around the world. The review calls for more comparative work on diverse approaches to lay participation, examining how different methods of including lay participation promote or detract from fact finding, legal consciousness, civic engagement, and citizen power.

The decision as to whether an individual requires an administrator to manage some or all of his or her financial affairs is ultimately a legal decision. According to Australian law, this decision must be in the best interests of the individual, and must also be “the least restrictive alternative”. The decision is usually based in part on reports or evidence provided by health-care professionals about the strengths and limitations of the person whose competence is in question. The problem is that currently in Australia there are no universally accepted definitions of financial competence, and no objective, uniform standards for assessing financial competence. The overall goal of the present study was to assess the validity and reliability of a measure of financial competence: the Financial Competence Assessment Inventory (FCAI). The FCAI demonstrated good reliability and validity when used with people with and people without cognitive impairment and was able to distinguish between people with and people wi...

This paper presents a novel algorithmic approach to the problems of inconsistency and bias in legal decision making. First, we propose a new tool for reducing inconsistency: "Synthetic Crowdsourcing Models" (“SCMs”) built with machine learning methods. By providing judges with recommendations generated from statistical models of themselves, such models can help those judges make better and more consistent decisions. To illustrate these advantages, we build an SCM of release decisions for the California Board of Parole Hearings. Second, we describe a means to address systematic biases that are embedded in an algorithm (e.g., disparate racial treatment). We argue for making direct changes to algorithmic output based on explicit estimates of bias. Most commentators concerned with embedded biases have focused on constructing algorithms without the use of bias-inducing variables. Given the complex ways that variables may correlate and interact, that approach is both practically difficult and harmful to predictive power. In contrast, our two-step approach can address bias with minimal sacrifice of predictive performance.

A central question in the study of courts' legitimacy pertains to the extent to which the specific court decisions affect their institutional legitimacy – an issue of both theoretical and empirical concern. The scholarly literature (centered almost entirely on the US Supreme Court) typically distinguishes between diffuse and specific support – the former referring to general attitudes toward the institution, while the latter addresses the congruence between the particular content of a judicial decision and the policy preferences of the evaluating public. The conventional view in the literature suggests that the level of diffuse support is typically unaffected by short-term variations in specific support. To the extent that such a relationship exists, changes in diffuse support are short-lived and incremental. However, recent findings suggest that specific support impacts diffuse support.These conflicting empirical findings presents a puzzle, which requires resolution – either by resolving that one empirical account is more valid than the other; or by revising the theory in a way that may account for both seemingly conflicting results. Our study takes the latter approach. Drawing on the work of Hoekstra (2000) we suggest that different judicial decisions vary in their relevance to the evaluating public. This "content-relevance" of the decision serves as a judgment-weight of specific support in the updating process of diffuse support. Given a particular level of specific support (e.g. in/congruence between the judicial decision and preferred policy), low content-relevance is hypothesized to entails minimal updating of diffuse support, while high content-relevance lead to it pronounced updating.We utilize a unique political situation created by one judicial decision by the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ) during the 2013 municipal elections. The HCJ ordered the removal of three city elected mayors (on the basis of their indictments for corruption) less than a month before the municipal elections yet permitted all three to put their names on the ballots. In fact, all three incumbent mayors were consequently reelected by the relevant constituencies shortly after their removal by the court. This unique setting permits simultaneous comparison of the responses of communities for which the same court decision is either strongly or weakly relevant. We control for potential intervening factors by selecting demographically matched cities, and by controlling for a host of individual-level characteristics. Our findings provide support for the content-relevance hypothesis. Specific support was found to be associated with diffuse support only in 'target' cities (addressed directly by the judicial decision), but not in the 'control' cities. These findings replicate the two sets of seemingly conflicting results reported in the literature, and offer systematic and theoretically based resolution to these diverging results. Moreover, this study contributes to the literature on court legitimacy also by expanding the geographic, political and legal context in which public opinion interacts with legal decision.

A number of multicriteria decisions must be made during construction investment processes. A number of support systems for multicriteria tasks of construction investment processes are available. A part of them is reviewed in this article. Effectiveness of the construction investment process is greatly influenced by an appropriate formulation of a construction contraction agreement (CCA). In order to formulate the effective contraction agreements, multicriteria techniques for evaluating and comparing CCAs must be created. Besides technical, organisational and economic aspects of construction, legal aspects of a CCA must be also analysed in order to prepare such techniques. Therefore, legal decision making systems are also reviewed in the article. A conclusion can be made from the review that legal decision making systems for CCAs are not available currently. One of the main tasks in the creation of multicriteria support systems is the formation of a multicriteria indicator system. Three models of multicriteria indicator systems of CCAs are analysed in the article, and the best model for creating multicriteria evaluation technique is determined. On the basis of this model, significance of indicators should be determined and a multicriteria decision support system should be created in further research stages. Statybos rangos sutarties rodiklių sistemos modeliai Santrauka Investicinio statybos proceso metu reikia priimti nemažai daugiakriterių sprendimų. Yra sukurta daug statybos paramos sistemų daugiakriteriams uždaviniams sprÄ™sti statybos investiciniame procese. Dalis iÅ¡ jų apžvelgta straipsnyje. Statybos investicinio proceso efektyvumui labai svarbus tinkamas statybos rangos sutarties sudarymas. Siekiant sudaryti efektyvias statybos rangos sutartis, reikia sukurti daugiakriteres statybos rangos sutarÄių įvertinimo ir palyginimo metodikas. Siekiant parengti tokias metodikas, reikia iÅ¡nagrinÄ—ti ne tik statybos techninius, organizacinius, ekonominius, bet ir teisinius statybos rangos sutarties aspektus. TodÄ—l straipsnyje pateikta ir teisinių sprendimų priÄ—mimo sistemų apžvalga. IÅ¡ Å¡ios apžvalgos taip pat darytina iÅ¡vada, kad Å¡iuo metu nÄ—ra statybos rangos sutarties teisinių sprendimų paramos sistemų. Vienas iÅ¡ pagrindinių uždavinių kuriant daugiakriteres paramos sistemas yra daugiakriterių rodiklių sistemos nustatymas. Straipsnyje nagrinÄ—jami trys daugiakriterių statybos rangos sutarties rodiklių sistemos modeliai ir nustatytas geriausiai daugiakriterio įvertinimo metodikai kurti tinkantis modelis. Remiantis Å¡iuo modeliu tolesniuose tyrimo etapuose turÄ—tų bÅ«ti nustatomi rodiklių reikÅ¡mingumai ir kuriama daugiakriterÄ— sprendimų paramos sistema. ReikÅ¡miniai žodžiai: sprendimų paramos sistemos, statybos rangos sutartis, daugiakriteris vertinimas. First Published Online: 14 Oct 2010

Die vorliegende prospektive Langsschnittstudie beschreibt und erkundet den Einfluss der demografischen Entwicklung und politischer Reformen auf das zunehmende Risiko, mit einer psychischen Storung in ein Krankenhaus eingewiesen zu werden. Die statistische Analyse basiert auf individuellen Leistungsdaten aller 50-jahrigen und alteren Versicherten der Gmunder Ersatzkasse von 1993 bis 2003 (n = 453 609). Ereignisanalysen zeigen keinen linearen, sondern einen u-formigen Zusammenhang zwischen dem Alter und dem Risiko einer akut-stationaren Einweisung. Der Alterseffekt sinkt zudem signifikant, wenn auch die Zahl vergangener Krankenhausaufenthalte, die zeitliche Nahe zum Tod und der Familienstand im statistischen Modell berucksichtigt werden. Robust steigt dagegen die Zahl psychischer Erkrankungen als Nebendiagnose seit der verbindlichen Dokumentation und Datenubermittlung nach § 301 SGB V und seit dem Beschluss zur Einfuhrung der DRG-Vergutung in 2000. Da das Risiko einer akut-stationaren Behandlung von psychischen Nebendiagnosen am starksten in somatischen und nicht in psychiatrischen Kliniken zunimmt, vermuten wir einen ‚Up-grading’-Effekt. The present prospective longitudinal study describes and explores the impact of demographic change and political reforms on the growing risk of suffering from mental disorders and subsequent hospitalization. The statistical analysis is based on all insured individuals who were 50 years and older during the years 1993 to 2003 (n = 453 609) from a statutory sickness fund, the Gmunder Ersatzkasse. Event-history analyses show no linear but a rather u-shaped relationship between age and the risk to be given in-patient treatment for mental disorders. However, the age effect shrinks significantly when the number of previous hospital stays, the proximity to death, and the marital status are statistically controlled. On the other hand, the number of psychic disorders as a minor diagnosis has grown robustly after the legal requirement for fully documenting hospital cases according to § 301 SGB V and after the legal decision to introduce DRG refunding in 2000. Since the risk of in-hospital treatment of a psychic minor diagnosis increases most in somatic and not in psychiatric clinics, we suspect an up-grading effect.

Jurimetrical analysis offers a systematic insight into the factors and decisions that play a role in legal decision making. With the assistance of jurimetrical research patterns can be identified and defined far more clearly than by using traditional methods. Jurimetrics can contribute to the security of society in various ways including increasing the transparency of the legal system, which can be made more predictable as patterns in judicial decisions become more apparent. Jurimetrical research may also increase the legitimacy of the legal system by exercising a supervisory and monitoring role over the parties and procedures involved. All these elements combined ensure that jurimetrics increases legal certainty, which is an important requisite for the security of society, but in specific instances, may also be used as a research method in specific areas of concern.

The authors examine the use of mental health evaluations in legal decision making within a large, urban juvenile court system. The focus was on court files in child protection cases relating to 171 randomly selected mental health evaluations completed on parents and 44 evaluations completed on children. Parent evaluations (46.7%) were much more likely to be present in court files than child evaluations (5.9%), and evaluations conducted by in-house court clinicians (63.8%) were more often present than those conducted by noncourt clinicians (37.5%). References to evaluations in child welfare, legal, or mental health documents varied with the type of information, subject (parent or child), and source of the evaluation. Findings and/or recommendations of evaluations were cited in legal or mental health documents for approximately two thirds of parent evaluations but only one third of child evaluations. Evaluation findings and/or recommendations were stated as a basis for legal decisions in 36.2% of court-based parent evaluations, 21.0% of noncourt-based parent evaluations, and 2.3% of child evaluations. These results provide evidence of a modest impact of parent evaluations on legal decisions and notably less impact for child evaluations. The authors suggest directions for future research and practice in order to increase the accessibility and usefulness of clinical evaluations in legal decision making.

Litigation is being transformed by new visual communication technologies, including videoconferencing, PowerPoint, and computer animations. Yet the effects of these visual technologies on legal decision making are largely unknown. In order to understand better the most pressing issues surrounding technology in the courtroom, psychologists, lawyers, and representatives from technology companies and funding agencies attended a Research Conference on Courtroom Technology organized by the Federal Judicial Center. The goals of the conference were to identify issues raised by courtroom uses of new technologies that could be illuminated by empirical research and to suggest designs and methods for conducting that research. This paper emerged from that conference. The authors provide an overview of considerations that should guide research in this area, including a framework that takes into account features of the technology, the audience, and the legal strategy of the user of the technology. They outline a paradigm for conducting such research, illustrate it with several possible empirical studies of varying levels of experimental and conceptual complexity, and identify directions for subsequent research.

This paper contributes to the ebb and flow of innovations in decision support system design by presenting the MODDE methodology (Model Of Decision support system Design and Evaluation). It utilizes a simple conceptualisation of the software engineering process, and aims to provide computer consultants with guidance to the way they may include consideration of three qualitative dimensions of high level autonomous decision making. These three dimensions--discretion, consistency and resolution--have arisen directly from work in an applied legal domain. MODDE facilitates systematic attention to these dimensions in a way not previously done and thus complements existing software and requirements engineering practices.

The focus of this research is to examine the relationship between target discrimination (TD) and command responsibility (CR) as the primary barrier to the lawful use of autonomous lethal weapons under jus in bello. This paper begins with a thesis followed by three main points regarding the relationship and dependencies between TD and CR in the context of autonomous lethal weapons. Discrete roles in air-to-air and Air Interdiction are described that may permit autonomous systems to meet or exceed human thresholds in target discrimination and commensurate risk, followed by two brief case studies in fratricide to illustrate the main points submitted. Ultimately this research concludes that there is clear potential for autonomous lethal weapons to follow objective legal decision trees to meet rules of engagement criteria for the application of lethal force.

Physicians treating newly incapacitated patients often must navigate surrogate decision-makers through a difficult course of treatment decisions. Such a process can be complex. Physicians must not only explain the medical facts and prognosis to the surrogate, but also attempt to ensure that the surrogate arrives at decisions that are consistent with the patient's own values and wishes. Where these values and wishes are unknown, physicians must help surrogates make decisions that reflect the patient's best interests.

Despite the protection provided by Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, there remain barriers to inclusion of people with disabilities in institutions of higher education and in particular in professional programmes. Focusing on the case, Ohio Civil Rights Commission v. Case Western Reserve University (1996), this paper presents legal actions that are helping to clarify the policies protecting people with disabilities from exclusion from institutions of higher education. In particular, the paper focuses on a legal decision from the Ohio Supreme court affirming the right of Case Western Reserve's Medical School to reject a blind woman for admission to the medical school. By analysing this case using a policy analysis framework, the paper discusses the present impact and concerns for the future of these pieces of federal legislation on people with disabilities related to inclusion in institutions of higher education.

Telephone interviews with 104 family caregivers of Alzheimer's disease patients revealed that physicians progressively communicated more with caregivers and less with patients. We identified four levels of physician interaction with patients and five levels of interaction with caregivers. Caregivers wanted more information from physicians about expected progress of the disease, financial/legal issues, available services, research projects and their own personal needs. Half the caregivers had discussed advance directives with physicians, three-quarters of them had legal decision making powers for the patient, and one-third of the patients had living wills.

This paper explores how to extract argumentation-relevant information automatically from a corpus of legal decision documents, and how to build new arguments using that information. For decision texts, we use the Vaccine/Injury Project (V/IP) Corpus, which contains default-logic annotations of argument structure. We supplement this with presuppositional annotations about entities, events, and relations that play important roles in argumentation, and about the level of confidence that arguments would be successful. We then propose how to integrate these semantic-pragmatic annotations with syntactic and domain-general semantic annotations, such as those generated in the DeepQA architecture, and outline how to apply machine learning and scoring techniques similar to those used in the IBM Watson system for playing the Jeopardy! question-answer game. We replace this game-playing goal, however, with the goal of learning to construct legal arguments.

A hybrid legal knowledge‐based system, Advisory Support for Home Settlement in Divorce (ASHSD), is discussed. Legal knowledge for ASHSD is represented in two forms, as rules and cases. Besides distinguishing the two different forms of knowledge representation, the paper outlines the actual use of these forms in a computational architecture that is designed to generate a suitable solution for a given new case. Methods of measuring similarity between items (e.g. rules that are triggered and rules where not all preconditions are true in a given situation; past cases and the statement of a current problem) by techniques of numerical taxonomy are exploited for this purpose. The same methods give a convenient means of assessing whether a new problem is better tackled by calling on rules that express the usual legal knowledge in the area or by referring to a past case that has overridden the rules.

Psychiatric‐legal decision making by the mental health practitioner: The Clinician as de facto Magistrate. Edited by H. Bluestone, S. Travin, & D. Marlowe (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1994), 310 pages, $45.00.

O presente trabalho pretende, a partir da matriz pragmático-sistêmica, observar a teoria da probabilidade como apoio decisional aos casos que envolvem incertezas cientificas. A toxidade dos componentes químicos nas embalagens plásticas em contato com os alimentos é objeto de estudo nos mais variados campos do saber, sendo o componente químico bisfenol A (BPA) apontado como maléfico à saúde humana. As embalagens possuem uma função socioeconômica de extrema importância, mas a inobservância de limites mínimos na produção e informação aos consumidores pode gerar riscos complexos e invisíveis. O trabalho realiza uma conexão entre essas incertezas e a comunicação da decisão jurídica.

What role do legal rules and courts play in a market economy? What role should they play? Why do courts make the decisions that they do, and what are the some of the problems that arise with collective legal decision making?

Expert systems applications development in legal decision making has traditionally focused on the use of rule-based models. None of the systems has yet become a fully functional prototype or commercially viable. The attempts to design legal decision making systems without examining the intrinsic complex nature of the legal process has resulted in limited operational success. This paper discusses legal decision making, legal function and the differences between rule-based blackboard models. It is recommended that the blackboard model be used in the design of legal decision making systems while the rule-based will continue to be appropriate for the legal function applications. The use of more sophisticated models such as the blackboard will enable the scaling up of expert systems technology to more encompassing domains.

While scientists and area residents have been sounding the alarm about the health impacts of shale gas drilling for years, recent studies, a legal decision and public health advocates are bringing greater legitimacy to concerns. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves drilling vertically, then