One Hundred Years of Rectitude: Medical Witnesses at the Old Bailey, 1717–1817

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-494 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Landsman
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Technical Information ◽  
Expert Witnesses ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
Judicial Proceedings ◽  
Anglo American

Partisan expert witnesses, selected, prepared, and presented by the parties, are one of the central features of Anglo-American judicial proceedings. They provide fact finders with essential technical information and are authorized to propound a range of opinions and conclusions that other witnesses are not. Their views are often the deciding factor in hard-fought cases. Yet their association with one party and their apparent partiality have long troubled legal commentators. These concerns have grown in recent years along with the perception, not based on a great deal of empirical evidence, that more and more experts are being used to prove more and more different things in modern American trials.

scholarly journals England’s “Bloody Code” in Crisis and Transition: Executions at the Old Bailey, 1760–1837

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Devereaux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
History Of ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Execution Rates ◽  
Early Modern Era ◽  
Modern Era

The most celebrated and influential history of execution in England, V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), uses a survey of execution rates to make two very striking and seemingly persuasive assertions. First, more people were being hanged in early nineteenth-century England than at any time since the early modern era; and second, that the end of capital punishment came far more suddenly than previous studies have recognized. This article acknowledges and extends the importance of Gatrell’s first insight, while arguing that he nevertheless both understates the complexity of developments and overstates the suddenness with which both the letter and the practice of capital punishment were abandoned. It does so through a careful recalculation and analysis of execution rates at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where execution was practiced on a far larger scale than in any other jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world, and whose practice most profoundly shaped the perceptions of both critics and proponents of capital punishment alike.

Searching for Anglo-American Digital Legal History

2016 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 1047-1069 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Data Mining ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Digital History ◽  
Computational Tools ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
The Law ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Web

As the fields of digital humanities and digital history have grown in scale and visibility since the 1990s, legal history has largely remained on the margins of those fields. The move to make material available online in the first decade of the web featured only a small number of legal history projects: Famous Trials; Anglo-American Legal Tradition; The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Early efforts to construct hypertext narratives and scholarship also included some works of legal history: “Hearsay of the Sun: Photography, Identity and the Law of Evidence in Nineteenth-Century Courts,” in Hypertext Scholarship in American Studies; Who Killed William Robinson? and Gilded Age Plains City: The Great Sheedy Murder Trial and the Booster Ethos of Lincoln, Nebraska. In the second decade of the web, the focus shifted from distributing material to exploring it using digital tools. The presence of digital history grew at the meetings of organizations of historians ranging from the American Historical Association to the Urban History Association, but not at the American Society for Legal History conferences, the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association, or the British Legal History Conference. Only a few Anglo-American legal historians took up computational tools for sorting and visualizing sources such as data mining, text mining, and topic modeling; network analysis; and mapping. Paul Craven and Douglas Hay's Master and Servant project text mined a comprehensive database of 2,000 statutes and 1,200,000 words to explore similarities and influence among statutes. Data Mining with Criminal Intent mined and visualized the words in trial records using structured data from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey Online, 1674–1913. Locating London's Past, a project that mapped resources relating to the early modern and eighteenth century city, and also made use of the Old Bailey records. Digital Harlem mapped crime in the context of everyday life in the 1920s. Only in the past few years has more digital legal history using computational tools begun to appear, and like many of the projects discussed in this special issue, most remain at a preliminary stage. This article seeks to bring into focus the constraints, possibilities, and choices that shape digital legal history, in order to create a context for the work in this special issue, and to promote discussion of what it means to do legal history in the digital age.

scholarly journals Minimum Clearance Distance in Fall Arrest Systems with Energy Absorber Lanyards

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (11) ◽  
pp. 5823
Author(s):  
Elena Ángela Carrión ◽  
Belén Ferrer ◽  
Juan Francisco Monge ◽  
Pedro Ignacio Saez ◽  
Juan Carlos Pomares ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Image Processing ◽  
Quality Control ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Causes Of Death ◽  
Technical Information ◽  
Total Elongation ◽  
The Body ◽  
Energy Absorber ◽  
Accident Victim ◽  
Fall Arrest

Accidents due to falls from height are one of the main causes of death in workplaces. Fall arrest systems (FAS) are designed to arrest the fall safely without injuring the accident victim. Their main mission is to restrain the body so as to prevent it from hitting the ground, generating forces and accelerations in the arrest process that are not harmful. A lack of empirical evidence and scant technical information provided by manufacturers regarding minimum clearance distance (MCD) below anchorage makes it necessary to study the safety distances required in the use of Energy Absorber Lanyards (EAL). This paper aims to determine the MCD below anchorage to arrest a fall using an EAL without hitting the ground. The real deformation of EAL when stopping a fall is studied. Ten EAL models distributed internationally by six manufacturers were chosen. Dynamic behavior tests were performed on the samples. Using image processing the total elongation of the equipment (elastic plus plastic) is obtained. The main conclusions are that maximum plastic elongation could be reduced by 29%. The method described in EN 355: 2002 underestimates elongation by up to 70% for some equipment 20% of EAL’s exceed the maximum arrest force (Fm) allowed in EN 355. The MCD data provided by manufacturers is not reliable. The data provided by manufacturers are incomplete. It is recommended that quality control for EAL’s be strengthened to ensure that products launched onto the market meet the requirement of EN355. The findings of this study recommended increasing MCD distance longer than that calculated according to EN355, at less than 1 m.

What to Look for in the Technical Manual

1996 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 109-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Common Core ◽  
Technical Information ◽  
Speech Language Pathologists ◽  
Technical Manual ◽  
Reliability Estimates ◽  
Psychometric Quality ◽  
Test Use

The details presented in technical manuals for tests generally address a common core of issues related to the psychometric quality of the tests and the interpretation of their results. In this article, major categories of technical information are described in practical terms and related to test use and interpretation: (a) logical evidence of validity, (b) empirical evidence of validity, (c) types of reliability estimates for evaluating and interpreting tests, and (d) practical issues in understanding standardization data and using norms. The article is organized as a series of 20 questions concerning these categories of information. Responses to the questions include discussions of key measurement concepts and examples of the kinds of tests used by speech-language pathologists. Potentially unfamiliar or confusing terms are italicized when first used, and each term is followed by a brief definition.

The indispensability of belief to religion

2001 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAUL HELM
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Causal Claim ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Anglo American

The article examines a central methodological tenet of Grace Jantzen's Becoming Divine. In this book she turns her back on what she calls Anglo-American philosophy of religion in favour of what she calls a continental approach. I argue that for her, belief is as indispensable in religion and in the philosophy of religion as it is for the Anglo-American philosophy of religion which she rejects. Further, the only argument that she offers for her position is a genetic argument for the origins of religious belief. Consistently with her position, she does not consider any empirical evidence relevant to this causal claim. However, the logic of such genetic claims is that for every empirically grounded genetic argument for A there is a corresponding genetic argument for not-A. So if such an argument invalidates A, it also invalidates not-A.

Legal control of expert witness bias

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 69-78
Author(s):  
Mingxiao Du
Keyword(s):  
Legal System ◽  
Expert Witness ◽  
Dual Process ◽  
Expert Witnesses ◽  
Industry Standards ◽  
Analytic Process ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Legal System ◽  
The Individual

Impartiality of expert witnesses means that such experts operate within scientific principles and legal procedures. By doing so, they assist the trier of fact. There are two aspects to the requirements for the impartiality of expert witnesses: the individual perspective and the industry perspective. Each expert witness must follow individual standards, including avoiding irrelevant information affecting his or her opinions; applying reliable methods; employing reasonable analysis; and providing the findings in comprehensive reports (including a precise description of personal background and expert activity). They must also follow industry standards of forensic science regarding objective technical accessible demands, laboratory management and career management. Biased expert witnesses, however, will damage impartiality and impede the goal of assisting the trier of fact. Based on psychological theories such as dual process theory, authoritarian personality and intergroup threat, this paper classifies expert witness bias into four categories: (1) cognitive bias; (2) bias in the analytic process; (3) bias resulting from the position of the expert witness at trial; and (4) the social bias arising from social pressure or economic pressure. Because bias influences the relevance, credibility and impartiality of experts, steps should be taken to restrict certain categories of bias, which can be and must be controlled. Reflecting the differences between the Anglo-American legal system and the Chinese legal system, in China the bias of expert witnesses should be controlled in terms of actions, occupational management and independence of laboratories.

Towards an Integrated (and Possibly Pan-European?) Prima Facie Legitimacy Test: Merging the Rechtsgut Theory, the Offensività Principle, and the Harm Principle

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 241-263
Author(s):  
Lucille Micheletto
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Essential Elements ◽  
Harm Principle ◽  
The European Union ◽  
European Union Level ◽  
Core Elements ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Key Aspects

Abstract The Anglo-American harm principle, and its European counterparts – the legal goods theory and the offensività principle – attempt to provide an answer to the question of which conducts can be prima facie legitimately criminalised. Despite the historical, conceptual, and practical differences between these criminalisation approaches, they share important elements, particularly from a functional and operational perspective. By merging the key aspects of these theories, this work elaborates an instrument to assess the prima facie legitimacy of criminalisation – the Integrated Legitimacy Test – that embeds their essential elements and further conceptualises them. The Test strives to overcome some of the criticisms directed against the Anglo-American and European theories by narrowly defining their core elements and linking them to empirical evidence. Moreover, its transnational nature makes it suitable to feed the criminalisation debate at the European Union level.

Challenges to the social motivation theory of autism: The dangers of counteracting an imprecise theory with even more imprecision

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirko Uljarević ◽  
Giacomo Vivanti ◽  
Susan R. Leekam ◽  
Antonio Y. Hardan
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Social Motivation ◽  
Motivation Theory ◽  
The Social

Abstract The arguments offered by Jaswal & Akhtar to counter the social motivation theory (SMT) do not appear to be directly related to the SMT tenets and predictions, seem to not be empirically testable, and are inconsistent with empirical evidence. To evaluate the merits and shortcomings of the SMT and identify scientifically testable alternatives, advances are needed on the conceptualization and operationalization of social motivation across diagnostic boundaries.

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