Should physicians be afraid of tort claims? Reviewing the empirical evidence

Do tort claims, or the fear of them, result in the adoption of practices aimed at protecting against tortious liability? Legislators, courts, and legal scholars often seem to think so, but is there empirical evidence to support this assumption? This article provides an answer to this question for the field of medical practice. An analysis of empirical studies on defensive medicine raises doubts as to whether the assumption holds true. The findings indicate that the empirical evidence is weak and that, if there is a concern about defensive practices, it seems to exist primarily in physicians’ minds. The results contribute to a better understanding of how tort law works, what effects it has on behaviour, and whether legal actors, especially at the intersection of law and medicine, should give credence to the defensive practices concern

Purposes and challenges of legal network analysis on case law

Legal Network Analysis (LNA) studies predominantly focus on citation analysis. LNA has served various purposes, including determining the relevance of court decisions in terms of them being precedents, to explore how the relevance changed over time, and to examine which cases are similar based on their proximity in the citation network (community detection). LNA researchers have relied on various network analysis measures when answering their research questions. This raises the question which approaches can or should be used in order for LNA to produce meaningful results. Focusing on case law, this contribution discusses the purposes and challenges of LNA. More specifically, it will be shown that LNA lacks a proper reference point for evaluating the results and that, as a result, a methodology needs to be developed in order to produce results that are valid. Four specific aspects are subsequently explored more in-depth: (1) how to select sub-networks, (2) which community detection method to select, (3) estimating the probability that the network and its relationships as observed in the data did not occur by chance, and (4) which centrality measure to select to determine the extent to which a decision is a precedent. By examining these purposes and challenges, we aim to develop a research agenda for conducting LNA. Possible avenues for future research are discussed

Instructional Support for Novice Law Students: Reducing Search Processes and Explaining Concepts in Cases

Nievelstein, F., Van Gog, T., Van Dijck, C., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2011). Instructional support for novice law students: Reducing search processes and explaining concepts in cases. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 25(3), 408-413. doi:10.1002/acp.1707Reasoning about legal cases is a complex skill that imposes a high working memory load,especially for novice students. Not only do novices lack necessary conceptual knowledge,searching through the information sources that are used during reasoning can also be assumed to impose a high additional working memory load that does not contribute to learning. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of supporting novice law students’ learning by a) providing the meaning of important concepts in the case, and b) reducing the search process by providing a condensed (relevant articles only) rather than a complete civil code. Results show that performance on a test case (for which they had to use the complete civil code) was significantly better for participants who had used the condensed civil code during learning. Performance on a conceptual knowledge posttest was significantly enhanced when students had received the concept explanations during learning

Plas/Valburg na CBB/JPO? Een netwerkanalyse van rechtspraak over afgebroken onderhandelingen in de precontractuele fase

In de literatuur wordt betoogd dat CBB/JPO het leidende arrest is bij afgebroken onderhandelingen, en niet langer Plas/Valburg. Uit een uitgevoerde netwerkanalyse volgt dat Plas/Valburg minder vaak, maar nog altijd geregeld is aangehaald nadat CBB/JPO is gewezen. Een nadere inspectie laat zien dat er een tweedeling in de lagere rechtspraak bestaat: een groep uitspraken stelt onaanvaardbaar afbreken als voorwaarde voor de mogelijkheid om gemaakte kosten voor vergoeding in aanmerking te laten komen, in een andere groep uitspraken geldt die voorwaarde niet. Plas/Valburg wordt met name in de laatstgenoemde groep uitspraken geciteerd. Geconcludeerd wordt dat drie situaties denkbaar zijn: (1) afbreken staat vrij, geen verplichting tot het vergoeden van schade; (2) afbreken staat vrij, maar niet zonder vergoeding; en (3) afbreken is onaanvaardbaar. Plas/Valburg biedt voor geen van de situaties handvatten. CBB/JPO is leidend voor de laatste categorie, maar niet om te beoordelen of sprake is van welke van de twee andere scenario’s

The worked example and expertise reversal effect in less structured tasks: Learning to reason about legal cases

Nievelstein, F., Van Gog, T., Van Dijck, G., & Boshuizen, H. P. A. (2013). The worked example and expertise reversal effect in less structured tasks: Learning to reason about legal cases. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 38, 118–125.The worked example effect indicates that learning by studying worked examples is more effective than learning by solving the equivalent problems. The expertise reversal effect indicates that this is only the case for novice learners; once prior knowledge of the task is available problem solving becomes more effective for learning. These effects, however, have mainly been studied using highly structured tasks. This study investigated whether they also occur on less structured tasks, in this case, learning to reason about legal cases. Less structured tasks take longer to master, and hence, examples may remain effective for a longer period of time. Novice and advanced law students received either a description of general process steps they should take, worked examples, worked examples including the process steps, or no instructional support for reasoning. Results show that worked examples were more effective for learning than problem-solving, both for novice and advanced students, even though the latter had significantly more prior knowledge. So, a worked example effect was found for both novice and advanced students, and no evidence for an expertise-reversal effect was found with these less structured tasks