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

National Identity, Implicit In-Group Evaluation, and Psychological Well-Being Among Emirati Women

© The Author(s) 2018. A sense of connectedness, and belonging to a valued social group (social identity processes), has been found to promote psychological well-being. This study, using implicit and explicit assessments, extends the exploration of social identity and well-being to citizens of the United Arab Emirates (Emiratis). In this cross-sectional correlational study, Emirati college women (N = 210), all of them bilingual (English/Arabic), performed an affective priming task designed to assess, implicitly, in-group (Emirati) preference (a positive bias toward the in-group relative to an out-group). Participants also completed the Multicomponent In-Group Identification Scale (MIIS), a measure of in-group identification and self-report measures of English/Arabic language proficiency. Participants also reported their psychological well-being using the World Health Organization’s well-being index. Implicit in-group preference and self-reported Arabic language dominance were independently predictive of higher levels of psychological well-being. The implicit measure was the strongest, most robust, predictor. Interventions aimed at maintaining or increasing a positive sense of a shared social identity may be a useful objective of public mental health strategy