Insurance -- 1962 Tennessee Survey

The courts of Tennessee were confronted by a number of interesting problems of insurance law during 1962. For the most part, the results were neither startling nor unsettling. There were, however, decisions that seem to qualify previous opinions, sometimes without citation, and there was one very troublesome opinion concerning credit life insurance

Covered Employment and Compensable Injury Concepts in Tennessee

This article surveys the existing law of Tennessee applicable to the problems of determining what is covered employment and what constitutes a compensable injury. The survey indicates no radical differences between the law of Tennessee and that of most American jurisdictions,although there are a few troublesome problems in particular areas, such as the Act of God and positional risk cases

Equal Pay Acts: A Survey of Experience Under the British and American Statutes

The United States Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 as an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Its British parallel, the Equal Pay Act 19702, took effect at the very end of 1975 and was much amended by the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. The five year delay between enactment and enforcement provided time for employers and labor unions to adjust to the new requirements. The drafters of the British statute were aware of the United States statute, and United States cases interpreting that act were relied on quite early in United Kingdom litigation. Now that the British statute has a decade of interpretation behind it, a sufficient body of data permits a meaningful comparison of the experience under these two statutes. This Article concentrates on the doctrinal development concerning conditions of employer liability and employer defenses under both the British and American interpretations of equal pay. The influence of Common Market law and other aspects of the environments in which these laws operate will emerge in that discussion. Since the European Community law structure will be unfamiliar to some readers, a brief overview is set out as the next portion of this introduction; it is compared in broad terms to the American federal structure. Because the equal value sections of the British law have thus far received only sketchy interpretation, that law is discussed in a separate section, following those dealing with comparisons between the United States statute and the pre-1984 British act

Insurance -- 1964 Tennessee Survey

In Phoenix Ins. Co. v. Brown,\u27 the named insured in a fire policy was Walter Brown. Walter had at one time owned the property insured. He had, however, conveyed it to his divorced wife Elsie, for whom he was looking after the property, prior to the taking out of this policy. It was not alleged that the defendant\u27s agent (who had previously written other policies on the property in Walter\u27s name at the time Walter was the title-holder) knew of the conveyance to Elsie. After total destruction by fire the defendant refused to pay on the grounds of the lack of insurable interest. The Court of Appeals for the Eastern Section affirmed a judgment against the company. The court concluded: Under the proof in this case, Walter Brown acted as the agent of the owner in looking after the property and keeping it insured. If he had failed to procure insurance he might have been held responsible for the loss and we think, under the authorities above cited and discussed, he had an insurable interest

Law As Text: A Response to Professor Michael Ryan

Law, Professor Michael Ryan reminds us by his emphasis on law as legitimating representation, is also text. This is the most telling of the many points he sets out in his provocative and thoughtful article; for those of us called to the bar, it is an important reminder. For us lawyers, after all, law is not so much text as it is process, not so much noun as verb. It is not that we disregard the fact that law is in part a pen-and-ink affair. Our shelves sag with books; in academic life, few divisions of a university spend so great a portion of the budget on the library as does a law school. It is rare for lawyers, however, to read a volume of a code from cover to cover, or a whole volume of reported decisions, even of the United States Supreme Court. We seek out paragraphs here and there, stumble over subsections, or ferret out helpful passages from opinions much as a carpenter rummages in the wood box to find those bits and pieces that will make the new bookshelves presentable. The text of law is for us tool or obstacle, a starting point for our labor, not an end. If we lawyers have a chief reason to be grateful to the law-and-literature theorists, surely it is this: They remind us that for much of society, including many of its most articulate and thoughtful members,law is first and foremost text, a text with structure, tone, and syntax.Thus, for those in society who must work with the law, legal text represents a part--arguably an indispensable part-of law\u27s reality.No doubt our failure as lawyers to think of law as a body of text reflects that, while our skills are generalized, our interests become increasingly particular after we pass the bar examination and apprentice ourselves to become tax lawyers, or labor lawyers, or any one of many specialists within the legal profession. As we thus narrow the focus of our work we narrow also our use of the written law. We disregard most of the available text, instead seeking out increasingly particularized sections of code, opinion, or regulation that conform to our theories of what the law should be

The Paramour Problem Returns: A Smoking Bed?

Robert N. Covington, JD, is Professor of Law at the Vanderbilt University Law School, Nashville, TN 37203-1181

Book Reviews

U.S. Multinationals and Worker Participation in Management: The American Experience in the European Community By Ton DeVos Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 1981. Pp. 229. Reviewed by David M. Helfeld Cooperation between Management and Labor By Walter Kolvenbach Deventer, The Netherlands: Kluwer Law and Taxation Publishers, 1982. Pp. 89. Dfl. 65.00, $26.00. Reviewed by Robert N. Covington Utilization of Outer Space and International Law By Gijs Bertha C.M. Reijnen. Amsterdam, Oxford, New York: Elsevier,1981. Pp. 179.$65.30. Reviewed by Howard J. Taubenfel

Book Reviews

It is refreshing to find among the myriad of volumes on trial practice published in recent years one which neither assumes that cases are tried in an emotional vacuum, where nothing but concrete facts and abstract propositions of law can influence the jury, nor deteriorates into a personal reminiscence on the part of the author of past court-room victories with the simple instruction to the reader to go and do likewise. Obviously a widely experienced courtroom practitioner, Mr.Gazan seldom utilizes that background directly for purposes of illustration; rather he draws from it general propositions applicable to courtroom procedure, which he then buttresses where necessary with citations to reported decisions. And to this he adds another ingredient found all too seldom in books of this type--a simple, straightforward,readable style which is easily understood and easily remembered

Defence Responses of Arabidopsis thaliana to Infection by Pseudomonas syringae Are Regulated by the Circadian Clock

The circadian clock allows plants to anticipate predictable daily changes in abiotic stimuli, such as light; however, whether the clock similarly allows plants to anticipate interactions with other organisms is unknown. Here we show that Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) has circadian clock-mediated variation in resistance to the virulent bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. tomato DC3000 (Pst DC3000), with plants being least susceptible to infection in the subjective morning. We suggest that the increased resistance to Pst DC3000 observed in the morning in Col-0 plants results from clock-mediated modulation of pathogen associated molecular pattern (PAMP)-triggered immunity. Analysis of publicly available microarray data revealed that a large number of Arabidopsis defence-related genes showed both diurnal- and circadian-regulation, including genes involved in the perception of the PAMP flagellin which exhibit a peak in expression in the morning. Accordingly, we observed that PAMP-triggered callose deposition was significantly higher in wild-type plants inoculated with Pst DC3000 hrpA in the subjective morning than in the evening, while no such temporal difference was evident in arrhythmic plants. Our results suggest that PAMP-triggered immune responses are modulated by the circadian clock and that temporal regulation allows plants to anticipate and respond more effectively to pathogen challenges in the daytime