Accidental Torts

One way to understand tort law is as a functional response to the social problem of accidental personal injury. That puts the negligence action at the center, and emphasizes the doctrinal choice between negligence and strict liability, while downplaying the intentional torts and the torts that do not involve physical injury. It also foregrounds the policy choice between tort and other means of dealing with accidents. This functional treatment is not uncontroversial today, but it is certainly orthodox. Here I propose to bring back into view some neglected aspects of the intellectual origins of the accident-centered approach to tort law. When torts was emerging as an important doctrinal category in the common-law world during the late nineteenth century, the early commentator who did the most to organize it around the problem of accidental injury was the young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The influential slant he gave to the subject turns out to have resulted from his struggle with doubts, surprising and possibly instructive to us, about whether torts was a viable legal category at all. Neither Holmes\u27 doubts about torts nor the theory with which he resolved them had much to do with his views about proper social policy toward industrial accidents. He was mainly responding to the inner dynamics of a juristic debate about the taxonomic arrangement of the substantive law, a debate that had been triggered by the legislative abolition of the common-law forms of action. Jurists drawing on conceptual traditions inherited from Roman law favored adopting tort as a basic category, while those influenced by the analytical jurisprudence of Bentham and Austin pressed the other way. After first taking the Bentham-Austin side, Holmes dis- covered that centering tort law around the problem of accidents could justify its recognition as an important subject after all. Coincidentally, the burst of personal injury litigation that accompanied the growth of railroads and factories in the late nineteenth century made Holmes\u27 accident-centered formulation of tort law especially salient in practical terms, and his theory went on to gain the dominant position it holds today, at least in the United States. It thus turned out that in resolving an abstruse theoretical puzzle about the arrangement of the law in the way he did, Holmes was helping to construct an understanding of torts that is still dominant a century later, when its origins have largely been forgotten. As a final twist, we now have our own quite different doubts about torts, based more on concerns about accident policy than on views about conceptual arrangement-and the accident-centered conception that Holmes devised to justify the subject in the first place turns out to leave it especially vulnerable to these doubts

Soleus stretch reflex during cycling

The modulation and strength of the human soleus short latency stretch reflex was investigated by mechanically perturbing the ankle during an unconstrained pedaling task. Eight subjects pedaled at 60 rpm against a preload of 10 Nm. A torque pulse was applied to the crank at various positions during the crank cycle, producing ankle dorsiflexion perturbations of similar trajectory. The stretch reflex was greatest during the power phase of the crank cycle and was decreased to the level of background EMG during recovery. Matched perturbations were induced under static conditions at the same crank angle and background soleus EMG as recorded during the power phase of active pedaling. The magnitude of the stretch reflex was not statistically different from that during the static condition throughout the power phase of the movement. The results of this study indicate that the stretch reflex is not depressed during active cycling as has been shown with the H-reflex. This lack of depression may reflect a decreased susceptibility of the stretch reflex to inhibition, possibly originating from presynaptic mechanisms

In Silico Approaches and the Role of Ontologies in Aging Research

The 2013 Rostock Symposium on Systems Biology and Bioinformatics in Aging Research was again dedicated to dissecting the aging process using in silico means. A particular focus was on ontologies, as these are a key technology to systematically integrate heterogeneous information about the aging process. Related topics were databases and data integration. Other talks tackled modeling issues and applications, the latter including talks focussed on marker development and cellular stress as well as on diseases, in particular on diseases of kidney and skin