Towards a Global Model for Adjudicating Personal Injury Damages: Bridging Europe and the United States

Techniques for awarding personal injury damages assume an increasing interest in times of frequent mobility of individuals. Assessing non-economic damages might require more harmonized answers to provide justice and equal treatment across the world. Indeed, in most countries a lasting debate surrounds noneconomic damages for personal injury. Specifically, an alleged constant increase in awards and the difficulties linked to the subjectivity of their assessment, and the selection of the institution that is best suited to award these damages and how it should do so are but a few problems that are addressed by contemporary scholarship. However, this extensive debate has not sufficiently explored the techniques for awarding intangible loss damages in personal injury by using a comparative law methodology. Filling this gap, this article explores the latest developments in awarding non-economic damages. It proposes an analysis of the American and European experiences that aims to bridge the two legal cultures for mutual benefit. By way of comparative and historical analysis, Part I highlights the significant trend in American and European jurisdictions, which consists of distinguishing non-economic damages based on objective criteria stemming from an ascertainable medical condition. Building on these results, Parts II and III develop a more efficient conceptual framework and further propose better assessment tools in awarding these damages. This method demonstrates the benefits the United States could gain by introducing innovative judicial scheduling, without triggering either constitutional concerns or statutory intervention while building upon the existing strengths of the European experience and the American judicial system. For instance, Normalized Value Scheduling would endow actual judges and jurors with the necessary expertise, increasing horizontal and vertical equality without necessarily impeding an inevitable variability of awards among different jurisdictions

Towards a Digital Ecosystem of Trust: Ethical, Legal and Societal Implications

The European vision of a digital ecosystem of trust rests on innovation, powerful technological solutions, a comprehensive regulatory framework and respect for the core values and principles of ethics. Innovation in the digital domain strongly relies on data, as has become obvious during the current pandemic. Successful data science, especially where health data are concerned, necessitates establishing a framework where data subjects can feel safe to share their data. In this paper, methods for facilitating data sharing, privacy-preserving technologies, decentralization, data altruism, as well as the interplay between the Data Governance Act and the GDPR, are presented and discussed by reference to use cases from the largest pan-European social science data research project, SoBigData++. In doing so, we argue that innovation can be turned into responsible innovation and Europe can make its ethics work in digital practice

Insight from an Italian Delphi Consensus on EVAR feasibility outside the instruction for use: the SAFE EVAR Study

BACKGROUND: The SAfety and FEasibility of standard EVAR outside the instruction for use (SAFE-EVAR) Study was designed to define the attitude of Italian vascular surgeons towards the use of standard endovascular repair (EVAR) for infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) outside the instruction for use (IFU) through a Delphi consensus endorsed by the Italian Society of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery (Societa Italiana di Chirurgia Vascolare ed Endovascolare - SICVE). METHODS: A questionnaire consisting of 26 statements was developed, validated by an 18 -member Advisory Board, and then sent to 600 Italian vascular surgeons. The Delphi process was structured in three subsequent rounds which took place between April and June 2023. In the first two rounds, respondents could indicate one of the following five degrees of agreement: 1) strongly agree; 2) partially agree; 3) neither agree nor disagree; 4) partially disagree; 5) strongly disagree; while in the third round only three different choices were proposed: 1) agree; 2) neither agree nor disagree; 3) disagree. We considered the consensus reached when >70% of respondents agreed on one of the options. After the conclusion of each round, a report describing the percentage distribution of the answers was sent to all the participants. RESULTS: Two -hundred -forty-four (40.6%) Italian Vascular Surgeons agreed to participate the first round of the Delphi Consensus; the second and the third rounds of the Delphi collected 230 responders (94.3% of the first -round responders). Four statements (15.4%) reached a consensus in the first rounds. Among the 22 remaining statements, one more consensus (3.8%) was achieved in the second round. Finally, seven more statements (26.9%) reached a consensus in the simplified last round. Globally, a consensus was reached for almost half of the proposed statements (46.1%). CONCLUSIONS: The relatively low consensus rate obtained in this Delphi seems to confirm the discrepancy between Guideline recommendations and daily clinical practice. The data collected could represent the source for a possible guidelines' revision and the proposal of specific Good Practice Points in all those aspects with only little evidence available