Sex Torts

America has a serious sexual problem. The sexual practices of a small percentage of Americans has created an unprecedented disease rate that is costing the American public about $20 billion per year. Lawsuits seeking damages for sexual disease transmission are on the rise, yet current sex tort law is mired with anti-heartbalm sentiment, is unpredictable, and is failing as a tool of deterrence, compensation, and education. This Article discusses the gravity of the sexual disease crisis, part of which is the public’s incredible ignorance about the rate of sexual disease, and tort law’s failure to do its part to help educate the public and deter irresponsible sexual behavior. This Article concludes that, based on the high degree of risk involved in irresponsible sex, and the problems created by the current negligence-based analytical paradigm, strict liability for sexual disease transmission should be adopted. Strict liability would deter sexual disease transmission, and educate the public about the sexual disease epidemic, more effectively than negligence

Unconscious Bias and Self-Critical Analysis: The Case for a Qualified Evidentiary Equal Employment Opportunity Privilege

Recent breakthroughs in social psychology have resulted in the ability to measure unconscious bias scientifically. Studies indicate that prejudiced responses are largely unconscious, the result of normal cognitive processing and stereotypical associations of which the prejudiced subject may be completely unaware. The studies also indicate that a subject\u27s awareness of the discrepancy between her conscious, egalitarian value system and her unconscious prejudice is a critical step towards the convergence of her cognitive functioning and her egalitarian viewpoints. Antidiscrimination legislation requires a showing of intent to discriminate to obtain relief in all but a small percent of circumstances. The result is a legal framework that does not, and cannot, properly redress most instances of discrimination. While the use of unconscious-bias testing may be more effective than antidiscrimination legislation in identifying and redressing the cognitive phenomenon of discrimination, evidence law does not support its use because test results are not privileged against discovery in discrimination lawsuits. This Article argues that in light of the enormous potential social benefit of unconscious-bias testing, a qualified evidentiary privilege should be recognized to encourage its use

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead