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Background Schools in Ireland closed in March 2020 as part of a national strategy to contain the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV-2). The extent to which schools contribute to the overall propagation of SARS-CoV-2 was continuing to evolve internationally. Aims To examine regional data on SARS-CoV-2 transmission in primary, post-primary and special schools in Cork and Kerry, two counties in southwest Ireland, during the first 6 weeks of the 2020–2021 academic year and determine the rate of in-school transmission. Methods Data were obtained from the Computerised Infectious Disease Reporting (CIDR) system and supplemented with digital records from the regional Department of Public Health (Dept PH) and from the Health Service Executive (HSE) Covid Care Tracker application. The positivity rate among school close contacts was calculated to determine the rate of in-school SARS-CoV-2 transmission. Results The overall rate of in-school transmission of SARS-CoV-2 was low at 4.1%. Positivity rates among students and staff who were close contacts were similarly low (3.1% vs. 6.9%, p = 0.07). One secondary case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerged, on average, for every 7.6 infectious days spent by an index case in school. Schools accounted for 2.2% of all notified cases of COVID-19 in the region during the observation period. Conclusions During the first 6 weeks of the academic year, the rate of in-school SARS-CoV-2 transmission in the region was low, and schools did not contribute substantially to the overall burden of COVID-19.

Objective: To objectively assess the utility of an exoscope during simulated otological surgery. Design: Cohort study. Setting: Tertiary referral otolaryngology centre. Participants: Seven experienced otologists undertook simulated temporal bone surgery on plastic temporal bones using the Zeiss Kinevo microscope with both a microscope and exoscope facility. Outcome measures: The utility of microscope and exoscope was compared using a Likert scale from 1 to 10 with and without PPE. Attributes assessed included image quality, depth perception, adequacy of view, exoscope positioning, surgeon comfort, surgeon safety and adequacy of image and protection for assistants and observers. Results: The exoscope in 3D mode performed as well as or better than the microscope for image quality, field of view and manoeuvrability. It outperformed the microscope for compatibility with PPE, surgeon comfort and assistant/observer experience. It scored almost as highly as the microscope for depth perception. Conclusion: There is likely to be a learning curve but this initial assessment of the exoscope shows significant potential as an alternative to the operating microscope in otological surgery but with the advantage of allowing the use of appropriate PPE and better ergonomics for both surgeon and assistant/observer.

Chapter 2 identifies a significant principle, immanent in tort law, vindicating the value in cooperative human arrangements. ‘Tort’s cooperation principle’ illuminates the necessity, at the duty of care stage in negligence claims, of analysing the prior dealings of the relevant parties. In claims between participants to a commercial arrangement, tort’s support for cooperation manifests in a preference for protecting the security of the coming together of the parties by refusing to recognise entitlements that would circumvent the arrangement. The common judicial assessment that society and the market expect commercial parties to be economically self-reliant exposes the importance of interrogating the reasonableness of commercial claimants’ reliance, for their own economic protection, on fellow participants in a commercial arrangement. This perspective reveals a long-standing doctrinal discontinuity and calls into question the reasoning used to support the Hedley Byrne & Co. Ltd. v. Heller & Partners Ltd. line of authority in commercial disputes.

These essays champion tort scholarship that puts the judges at centre stage: what they do, how they understand their role, the heterogeneous reasons they give for their decisions, and their constitutional responsibility to identify and articulate the ‘living’ and ‘evolving’ common law. This is ‘reflexive tort scholarship’. Reflexive tort scholars seek dialogue with Bench and Bar. Their approach is very different from the currently fashionable academic search for ‘Grand Theories’ that descriptively assert that tort law is fundamentally ‘all about one thing’, a unifying idea that alone explains and justifies the whole of tort law. The book illustrates the advantages and pay-offs of the reflexive style of scholarship by showing how it illuminates various key features of tort law. Essay 2 identifies a principle of tort law (the ‘cooperative principle’) that is latent in the cases and that vindicates the value of collaborative human arrangements. Identifying this principle calls into question, in disputes between commercial parties, the reasoning used to support one of the most entrenched lines of authority in tort law—that based on the famous case of Hedley Byrne v Heller. Essay 3 deploys the reflexive method to argue that the iconic ‘but-for’ test of factual causation is inadequate and narrower than the concept actually utilised in the cases. Application of the method also prompts a reassessment of the ‘scope of duty’ concept and of the appropriate characterisation of the much-discussed decision in SAAMCO. These essays clearly demonstrate the value of scholarship that ‘takes the judges seriously’.

In Gregg v Scott' the agreed facts were few. On 22 November 1994 Mr. Gregg presented to Dr Scott complaining of a lump under his left arm. In breach of his duty to Mr. Gregg, Dr Scott failed to refer him at once for biopsy investigation or to arrange to see him very soon to see if the lump had resolved itself. Had he done so, the lump would have been revealed to be cancerous and cancer treatment would have commenced in April 1995. The breach meant that the cancer went undetected until November 1995 and cancer treatment commenced in January 1996; the breach had caused a 9 month delay before treatment commenced. In this 9month period, the cancer spread to the left pectoral region. The details of treatment are important. From January 1996 chemotherapy and radiotherapy were administered but, although the tumour responded, it did so incompletely. As a result aggressive high dose chemotherapy was administered in August 1996. In early 1998 Mr. Gregg suffered a relapse, that is a new tumour was detected in the right axilla. The medical conclusion from this relapse was that he could not be "cured", that is survive for at least 10 years without evidence of the disease. Palliative therapy was administered. In April 1998 there was another suspected relapse and a further course of palliative therapy was administered. From April 1998 to the date of judgment in the trial on 3 August 2001, and on to the time when judgment was handed down by the House of Lords on 27 January 2005 there was no discernible recurrence of the disease: Mr. Gregg was in remission throughout. In Gregg the pre-tort range of fates confronting a cohort of 100 people with the same cancer as Mr. Gregg's and undergoing initial treatment were assessed at trial 2 as

This Note evaluates the decision in Williams v University of Birmingham [2011] EWCA Civ 1242 which reiterated that, though mesothelioma claimants are assisted with proof of factual causation by the radical Fairchild doctrine, they must establish the other elements of the claim in negligence in the orthodox way.

When misfortune befalls an individual, our social and legal arrangements may provide a variety of responses other than to let the losses associated with it lie where they fell. For example, the misfortune may have been the subject of private insurance taken out by the victim and at a level the victim chose. The risk of the misfortune may have been socialised by being covered by, say, a scheme of social insurance or social welfare. A third response is restoration of the victim, that is provision to the victim of a financial measure which attempts as far as money is able to return the victim to the position he was in before the misfortune occurred. Clearly, tort qualifies as a form of the third response because the measure of damages in tort is restorative of the victim; but is it also a form of the first two responses and, if so, what are the ramifications of this? Each of these three responses has its own rationale and, though any combination of responses may be triggered in the event of a misfortune, they often compete as alternatives in public policy debates about misfortune. Over time, the outcome of this competition displays certain trends. In this century, until about the late 1970s, there was a rise in the incidence of the insurance response but an even more dramatic rise in public policy reliance on the socialisation of risk across an increasing range of misfortunes. Parallel to this has come a general broadening of the catchment of situations recognised by the courts as giving rise to tort entitlements. In the past 20 years, however, concern has mounted in some quarters that both the latter trends (socialisation of risk and tort expansion) have gone too far and that such support for misfortune is now so over-developed that it stifles initiative by fostering a dependency culture and infringes the autonomy of those who are forced to finance these structures. The degree to which one shares this concern, if at all, will depend on one's politics. It is not a legal question. My aim in this article is to emphasise that whether one thinks the existing catchment of tort (or existing forms of social insurance and social welfare) should be reduced, leaving individuals merely with the support they can afford from Elrst party insurance or hope to receive from charity, is profoundly a matter of ideology. The reason this requires emphasis is that confusing tort with the other forms of support for misfortune can lead, and has recently led in the United States, to the presentation of these choices as apolitical and their resolution in favour of retrenchment of tort as merely the working through of inexorable logic. In this article I will deal with tort's relationship with insurance.l Concentrating first on the common but vague claim that tort is somehow 'about insurance,' I will argue that neither actual insurance nor insurability are or should be relevant to the reach and shape of tort liability. I then hope to explain why continued confusion on this point can lead to the conflation of tort with the insurance model of response to misfortune. Once this 'tort as insurance' construction of liability is embraced, the normative agenda for the future of tort inexorably points to retrenchment: an agenda, it can then be claimed, which arises from the mere logic of what tort is

Part 1 of this chapter argues that the High Court of Australia’s so-called “common sense test” of causation is an empty slogan, neither a test nor anything to do with common sense. For clarity of legal analysis the issue of whether a factor was involved with the existence of the relevant phenomenon (that is, the issue of factual causation) should be kept explicitly separate from the issue of the appropriate scope of legal responsibility for that phenomenon. Expressing the latter scope issue as a “causal” issue is obfuscating and should be abandoned. This Part also argues: that Australian courts should cease referring to the “scope of the duty”; that a factor should be recognised as a factual cause if it contributes in any way to the existence of the phenomenon in issue even if it is neither a “but for” nor a sufficient factor for the existence of that phenomenon; and that aspects of the civil liability legislation prompted by the Review of the Law of Negligence: Final Report (the “Ipp Report”) can and should be ignored. Part II elaborates the “factual causation then scope-of-liability-for-consequences” approach with illustrations from the common law and under statute, including many of commercial cases.

Previous accounts of ‘causation’ in the law are flawed by their failure to appreciate that causal language is used to express different information about the world. Because causal terms have been used to communicate answers to different questions, any philosophical search for a free-standing account of causation is doomed. Lawyers require precision of terminology, so they should explicitly choose just one interrogation to underlie causal usage in law. It is argued that this interrogation should be chosen to serve the wide projects of the law. In these projects the law is interested to identify when a specified factor was ‘involved’ in the existence of a particular phenomenon, where the notion of ‘involvement’ identifies a contrast between the actual world and some specified hypothetical world from which we exclude (at least) that specified factor: this contrast being that, while in the former world the phenomenon exists, in the latter it does not. (Such contrasts of necessity can be generated in three ways, all of importance to the law.)

This article explores the question of what character relations must have before the orthodox law of obligations will describe them as ‘causal’ relations. The article does not purport to identify the metaphysical nature of ‘causation’. Instead it provides a non-reductive account of what is essential before the law has described the relation between a specific factor and the existence of a particular indivisible phenomenon as ‘causal’. Section 1 presents a simple test for this relation — an ‘extended but-for test’ — that can be deployed in a straightforward way without engaging with theoretically complex and often problematic accounts of causation based on the notion of sufficient sets, such as Wright’s NESS account. Section 2 demonstrates how important principles relating to the separateness of a legal entity and to legal responsibility can resolve theoretical puzzles and in turn illuminate why the orthodox law of obligations does not choose to describe as ‘causal’ a relation wider than the one identified in this article.

Causation is a topic of central importance in the understanding of legal thought and case law. Yet relatively little emphasis seems to be put on it in law courses and it is an area about which the average lawyer knows relatively little. As a result law students, practitioners and academics often either grossly oversimplify or completely neglect causal issues. Those who delve more than superficially into the area may abandon the exercise in exasperation at the apparently intractable complexity of the subject-matter and principles involved. A concerted effort to state these principles as coherently as possible would obviously, then, be a most worthwhile exercise. This is what Hart and Honord's book Causation in the Law,1 the second edition of which has recently been published, seeks to do. It certainly contains much of value and interest to the general reader. Here, for example, an undergraduate would find an explanation of such mysteries as: why the damage deliberately caused by the Borstal boys in the Doiset Yacht2 case was taken to be the consequence of the Borstal officials' carelessness; why a negligent motorist may be said to have caused the additional injuries suffered by his victim when the latter receives negligent treatment in hospital (an example of the 'ulterior harm' cases); why Wagon Mound P has not had the dramatic impact on tort case law which some expected; and how the risk and foreseeability doctrines relate to each other and to other doctrines advanced as limits on the scope of legal responsibility. Likewise practitioners and judges would find useful perspectives, for example on the increasingly important topics of apportionment and onus of proof. Nonetheless, although the book contains much of interest to the general reader it fails to present it in a readily accessible form. Of course, Hart and Honor6 do not claim to be providing an undergraduate introduction to the topic of causation nor a practitioners' guide. Still, it is a shame that such a storehouse of useful theory-written in an easy and elegant style-could not have been structured in a way which would have facilitated easier access by this wider audience. The problem is that in presenting such a large work-the book is over 500 pages long-on such a complex topic the authors have understandably been concerned to expound the detail of and exceptions to their thesis. Unfortunately

The slow unimolecular dissociations of six members of the [CnH2n-3]+ (n = 3-8) series of unsaturated carbonium ions are explained in terms of a potential surface approach together with some concepts of mechanistic organic chemistry. The occurrence of some dissociations is shown to be precluded because either the reacting configurations or product combinations are inaccessible at energies appropriate to metastable transitions. The approach permits correct predictions to be made concerning the shapes of metastable peaks for dissociations which occur without σ-bond formation in the final step. In particular, the observation of a composite peak, thus indicating two channels for reaction, for C2H4 loss from [C7H11]+ is naturally accommodated.

The negative ion mass spectra of p-nitrobenzoyl derivatives of amino esters show pronounced molecular anions and characteristic fragmentation patterns. Fragment anions observed in the spectra of o-nitrobenzoyl analogues arise by various interactions between the nitro and amino ester groups. No fragmentation of the amino ester residue is observed for the m-nitrobenzoyl derivatives, but the +E spectra of these systems can be used to provide definitive structural information.

method of compensating the victims of personal injury.' These distortions arise from the debate's focus on accidents and from the neglect of issues raised by other types of personal injury where the injury cannot be unequivocally pinpointed to a certain time and place, but where the source is man-made and could potentially give rise to a civil action for damages. Such actual or apparently non-traumatic injuries, which I shall loosely term 'man-made disease', are not unusual. They include, for example: occupational injuries such as dust diseases, repetitive movement injury, deafness and dermatitis; product injuries such as diseases from tobacco (which causes Ioo00 00oo premature deaths a year in Britain)2 and chronic adverse drug reactions; and environmental injuries such as diseases caused by fertilizers and man-made radiation. Indeed, many of the cause celebres which have fuelled interest in the reform or replacement of tort law in the personal injuries field have involved hazards which fall into this broad class of injury: asbestos, thalidomide, diethylstilbestrol (DES), agent orange, etc. But despite this, the reform debate is focused on accidents.

Administrative law — Breach of natural justice — “Void” decision with consequences sufficient in law to justify an appeal — Whether fair appellate hearing cures defects at original hearing

The major slow unimolecular reactions undergone by C4H7+, C5H9+ and C6H+11 are discussed in terms of a potential surface approach and the organic chemist's concept of mechanism. It is shown that the observed decompositions which do not involve σ-bond formation in the dissociation step are precisely those expected from the model. Further use of the model correctly predicts the slow reactions of C7H+13 which have not previously been reported. The approach also permits useful limits to be set on the transition state energies for reactions involving σ-bond formation in the dissociation step (H2,CH4 loss). It is concluded that stepwise addition of ethylene to the allyl cation is preferred to a concerted 4-electron process which is symmetry forbidden.

Pronounced metastable peaks are observed for the two-stage decomposition and the multi - stage elimination from p-NO2C6H4(CH2)nCO2H (n>1). 2H and 18O labelling shows that each process involves elimination of atoms from both the nitro and carboxyl groups. A consideration of the spectrum of p-nitrophenylcyclohexane-4-carboxylic acid leads to the proposition that interaction between the two functional groups is not a necessary prerequisite for the elimination of HO⋅.

The mechanism whereby radical loss occurs from the molecular ions of numerous halogeno-aromatic and alkyl-aromatic compounds is investigated using the kinetic energy release which accompanies dissociation, the non-occurrence of plausible competing reactions, and appearance potential measurements. Slow elimination of a bromine radical from ionised bromobenzene is formulated as a simple cleavage and is evidenced by little kinetic energy release. In contrast, the major slow dissociations (metastable transitions) of ionised halogenotoluenes (halogen radical loss), xylenes and polymethylbenzenes (methyl radical loss), and toluene (hydrogen radical loss) all occur after ring expansion to ionised cycloheptatriene isomers. In these cases (apart from ionised toluene and ethylbenzene) the ring expansion process is rate-determining and the subsequent fast decompositions give rise to relatively large releases of kinetic energy. Further support for the analysis may be found from earlier work on these systems involving 2H- and 13C-labelling experiments; in particular, the observation of an isotope effect associated with the ring expansion of ionised p-chloroethylbenzene is strong evidence that this is the rate-determining step for Cl˙ loss.

Mass spectral evidence is presented to show that the dissociations of some simple oxonium ions in the gas phase occur by relatively non-concerted pathways.