The Interpretation of Statutes in Modern British Law

Mr. Justice Frankfurter recently said that the number of cases coming before the Supreme Court of the United States which were not based on statutes was reduced almost to zero. This growth of statutory as against pure case law is, of course, not confined to the United States. It inevitably accompanies the social welfare state and the increase in government which every modern industrial society has experienced and which two world wars, with their need for the total mobilization of resources, have further stimulated. Apart from these sociological factors which affect states with the most different legal systems, it is still customary to contrast the code-minded continental systems with the case-minded tradition of Anglo-American jurisprudence. Insofar as it is meant to indicate a parallel contrast in the judicial approach to statutes, this is in many ways a false antithesis. It is quite true that the history of the common law systems has encouraged an empirical and inductive approach to legal problems, a disinclination to think in terms of abstract rights and duties rather than of concrete remedies, a judicial distrust of parliamentary encroachments upon the sphere of the lawyer\u27s law. As will be shown, this attitude still powerfully influences the judicial approach to statutes in contemporary England. Insofar as American\u27law has taken over the basic principles and approach of the common law, this may well be true of the United States too; but the fundamental difference is that the United States, like other countries inside and outside the common law system, likes a written constitution

Otosclerosis—an inflammatory disease of the otic capsule of viral aetiology?

Fragments of otospongiotic and otosclerotic footplates were investigated by immunohistochemical methods. Antibodies IgG, IgA, IgM were found to be found to the vascular connective tissue of the resorption lacunae, IgG also to osteocytes. The application of antibodies against mumps, measles and rubella antigens showed the expression of the relevant viral antigens in the large cells of the resorption lacunae, in the vascular connective tissue, and in osteocytes, osteoclasts and chondrocytes, present in or around the otospongiotic areas. In the sclerotic stage only the perivascular connective tissue and chondrocytes have expressed viral antigens whereas IgG was restricted to the osteocytes of the sclerotic focus and to the residual perivascular tissue. Two footplates with postinflammatory sclerosis serving as controls revelaed only IgG in some chondrocytes. Healthy footplates showed neither a deposition of antibodies nor any expression of viral antigens. These results favour a viral aetiology of otosclerosis as an inflammatory vasclar reaction of the otic capsule initiated or caused by the viruses of measles, rubella and mump

Local Strategy Improvement for Parity Game Solving

The problem of solving a parity game is at the core of many problems in model checking, satisfiability checking and program synthesis. Some of the best algorithms for solving parity game are strategy improvement algorithms. These are global in nature since they require the entire parity game to be present at the beginning. This is a distinct disadvantage because in many applications one only needs to know which winning region a particular node belongs to, and a witnessing winning strategy may cover only a fractional part of the entire game graph. We present a local strategy improvement algorithm which explores the game graph on-the-fly whilst performing the improvement steps. We also compare it empirically with existing global strategy improvement algorithms and the currently only other local algorithm for solving parity games. It turns out that local strategy improvement can outperform these others by several orders of magnitude

An Exponential Lower Bound for the Latest Deterministic Strategy Iteration Algorithms

This paper presents a new exponential lower bound for the two most popular deterministic variants of the strategy improvement algorithms for solving parity, mean payoff, discounted payoff and simple stochastic games. The first variant improves every node in each step maximizing the current valuation locally, whereas the second variant computes the globally optimal improvement in each step. We outline families of games on which both variants require exponentially many strategy iterations