NEGLIGENCE-FORESEEABILITY AS A LIMITATION ON LIABILITY

Plaintiff\u27s truck broke down on the road. Another truck driver, attempting to pass plaintiff\u27s truck, became mired beside it, and the two trucks blocked the road. While plaintiff lay under his truck attempting repairs, a bulldozer operated by the defendant approached the two trucks from the rear. The driver of the second truck signaled the defendant to push his, the mired truck, but the defendant, mistaking the signal, pushed plaintiff\u27s truck, causing it to run over plaintiff\u27s legs. The defendant had not seen the plaintiff beneath the truck. The issue of defendant\u27s negligence was submitted to the jury, and verdict was for the plaintiff. On appeal, held, affirmed. The issue of the defendant\u27s negligence was properly for the jury. McDonald v. Ferrebee, 366 Pa. 543, 79 A. (2d) 232 (1951)

CORPORATIONS-DISSOLUTION-PAYMENT OF ACCRUED UNPAID DIVIDENDS TO PREFERRED SHAREHOLDERS FROM CAPITAL

The Big Bend Land Company was in the process of liquidation. The articles of incorporation provided for preferred stock which in the event of any liquidation . . . was . . . entitled to be paid in full the par value thereof, and all accrued unpaid dividends thereon before any sum shall be paid to or any assets distributed among . . . the common stock. No dividends had ever been declared or paid, nor had there ever been any surplus profits. After discharging all corporate liabilities, including payment of the par value of the preferred stock, the liquidating trustees brought suit for a declaratory judgment as to the disposition of the substantial assets remaining. A Washington statute provided that It shall not be lawful for the trustees to make any dividend except from the net profits arising from the business of the corporation, nor divide, withdraw, or in any way pay to the stockholders, or any of them, any part of the capital stock of the company . . . Provided, that this section shall not be construed to prevent a division and distribution of the capital stock of the company which shall remain after the payment of all its debts upon the dissolution of the corporation. The trial court found that the accrued unpaid dividends should be paid to preferred shareholders from the assets prior to any distribution to the common shareholders. On appeal, held, affirmed. Hay v. Hay, (Wash. 1951) 230 P. (2d) 791 (1951)

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-CHURCH AND STATE-THE NEW YORK RELEASED TIME PROGRAM

The recent decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Zorach v. Clauson affirms the constitutionality of the New York City program for releasing pupils from public schools so that they may attend religious education classes held outside of school property. The pupils are released upon the written request of their parents, and those not released from school remain in their classrooms. Regulations under which the program is conducted prohibit comment by school officials on attendance. Plaintiffs, who were taxpayers and parents of children attending the public schools, unsuccessfully contended that the program was a violation of the First Amendment as included within the Fourteenth Amendment on the ground that it was a prohibited establishment of religion as defined in the McCollum case. The Supreme Court through Justice Douglas, in upholding the New York program, distinguished the McCollum case upon the ground that the Illinois released time program therein found invalid took place within the school buildings, whereas the New York program was carried on outside of school property. Justices Frankfurter, Black, and Jackson, dissenting, thought the New York program unconstitutional in view of the McCollum case. In the McCollum case, the Supreme Court defined establishment of religion in terms so sweeping that virtually any religious education program could be included within the definition. In the voluminous comment which followed that case, two extreme positions were evident. Extreme opponents of released time seized upon the expression wall of separation between Church and State as being a formula prohibiting any and every type of religious education which might utilize public school funds or time. Extreme proponents of released time, on the other hand, equated secularist with socialist and atheist, even to the extent of suggesting that the Supreme Court itself violated the Constitution by establishing a religion without a church. The Supreme Court, however, seems to have decided the Zorach case by a process of balancing the interests involved in public and sectarian education. The scope of this comment is limited to showing the nature and propriety of this relative measure of an establishment of religion

EVIDENCE-RES IPSA LOQUITUR-EVIDENCE OF SPECIFIC NEGLIGENCE AS AFFECTING RELIANCE UPON GENERAL NEGLIGENCE

Plaintiff sued in New York to recover for injuries sustained in a crash of an airplane owned and operated by the defendant. Plaintiff\u27s pleading and proof relied upon general negligence and res ipsa loquitur, but after evidence of specific negligence was elicited upon cross examination of defendant\u27s witness, plaintiff also used such specific negligence in argument to the jury. The defendant excepted to the jury instruction which gave the plaintiff the benefit of the res ipsa loquitur doctrine. Verdict was for the plaintiff. On appeal, held, the plaintiff was entitled to the benefit of the res ipsa loquitur doctrine, but reversed on other grounds. Lobel v. American Airlines, Inc., (2d Cir. 1951) 192 F. (2d) 217

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW-JUDCIAL POWERS-STATE TAXPAYER DENIED STANDING AS PARTY IN INTEREST IN BIBLE READING CASE

Plaintiffs sought a judgment to declare unconstitutional a New Jersey statute which required the reading of five verses of the Old Testament at the opening of each day in the public schools. Plaintiffs contended that the practice under the statute was an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment and applicable to the several states through the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment Both plaintiffs were taxpayers of New Jersey, and one was also the parent of a child who had attended a public school, but had left school before the appeal was taken. The Supreme Court of New Jersey held that the law was constitutional. On appeal, held, dismissed, three justices dissenting. The dispute is not a case or controversy within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States. Doremus v. Board of Education, 342 U.S. 429, 72 S.Ct. 394 (1952)

An Imitation Learning Approach to Unsupervised Parsing

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in unsupervised parsers that optimize semantically oriented objectives, typically using reinforcement learning. Unfortunately, the learned trees often do not match actual syntax trees well. Shen et al. (2018) propose a structured attention mechanism for language modeling (PRPN), which induces better syntactic structures but relies on ad hoc heuristics. Also, their model lacks interpretability as it is not grounded in parsing actions. In our work, we propose an imitation learning approach to unsupervised parsing, where we transfer the syntactic knowledge induced by the PRPN to a Tree-LSTM model with discrete parsing actions. Its policy is then refined by Gumbel-Softmax training towards a semantically oriented objective. We evaluate our approach on the All Natural Language Inference dataset and show that it achieves a new state of the art in terms of parsing $F$-score, outperforming our base models, including the PRPN.Comment: ACL201

The First Probable Case of Hereditary Angioedema in Vietnam

Hereditary angioedema (HAE) is rare disorder due to C1-inhibitor deficiency (C1-INH) that are debilitating and may be life-threatening. HAE is a lack of consensus concerning diagnosis, therapy, and management, particularly in Vietnam. In this case report, we report a 40-year-old male patient with typical clinical symptoms and family history but he showed normal C4 level, and we could not measure C1q and C1-INH level. However, the diagnosis of HAE can be made based on typical clinical symptoms and the favorable prophylactic response to danazol treatment. Based on these findings, we suggest that he has type I HAE, although he showed normal C4 level