Risk Regulation and the Faces of Uncertainty

Dr. Walker addresses the difficulty of regulators\u27 working with potentially inaccurate information and clarifies related aspects of decision making by presenting a taxonomy for the kinds of uncertainty inherent in necessarily incomplete data

The Concept of Baseline Risk in Tort Litigation

This Article examines what is meant, or should be meant, by normal risk, and how to determine what the normal risks are in a given situation. This Article proposes a new legal concept baseline risk.\u27\u27 The objective is to design a concept of baseline risk that should prove useful in tort litigation by clarifying what is meant by normal risk and providing a well-defined concept upon which a reevaluation of traditional tort concepts might rest. A more precise notion of normal risk may assist in improving the designs of such traditional tort concepts as unreasonable risk, abnormally dangerous activity, product defect, and causation -concepts dangerous activity, that are stubbornly vague in increasingly unproductive ways

A Default-Logic Paradigm for Legal Reasoning and Factfinding

Unlike research in linguistics and artificial intelligence, legal research has not used advances in logical theory very effectively. This article uses default logic to develop a paradigm for analyzing all aspects of legal reasoning, including factfinding. The article provides a formal model that integrates legal rules and policies with the evaluation of both expert and non-expert evidence – whether the reasoning occurs in courts or administrative agencies, and whether in domestic, foreign, or international legal systems. This paradigm can standardize the representation of legal reasoning, guide empirical research into the dynamics of such reasoning, and put the representations and research results to immediate use through artificial intelligence software. This new model therefore has the potential to transform legal practice and legal education, as well as legal theory

Isle Of View

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/2894/thumbnail.jp

Retrospect on Fifty Years of Geography in the Ohio Academy of Science

Author Institution: Department of Geography, The University of AkronResearch by Ohio geographers over the 50-year history of the Geography Section of The Ohio Academy of Science (OAS) has been varied with respect to regional and topical themes. Research has closely followed the pattern of world events and social concerns. In the early years the areas of conservation, economic, urban and physical geography were popular. While urban and economic geography remained significant concerns over the 50 years, the past 15 years have had social and cultural concerns come to the fore. The regional focus on Ohio and the United States has been strong throughout the years. Interest in other regions has tended to fluctuate in response to world events, especially in years of crises and change as evidenced by World War II and the independence movement in Africa. Whenever special sessions were organized on particular regions, interest, as gauged by papers presented at OAS meetings, sky-rocketed but then quickly subsided. In the near future it is likely that trends begun in the late 1970s in topical and regional themes will continue