In a context in which current prohibitions under the Contempt of Court Act 1981 prevent research into the substantive content of real jury deliberations, the ways in which jurors in criminal trials in England and Wales approach the task of reaching collective verdicts remains the subject of considerable conjecture. This has necessitated the use of simulation studies to replicate as far as possi...

Suicide occurs relatively rarely under the age of 15 years, although prevalence is likely to be underestimated because of reluctance of coroners to assign this verdict. A large proportion of open verdicts (“undetermined cause”) are, in fact, suicides. Suicide rates are far higher in male than female adolescents. Until the past five or six years in England and Wales suicide rates were rising sub...

The current publishing system with its merits and pitfalls is a mending topic for debate among scientists of various disciplines. Editors and reviewers alike, both face difficult decisions about the judgment of new scientific findings. Increasing interdisciplinary themes and rapidly changing dynamics in method development of each field make it difficult to be an "expert" with regard to all issu...

The effect of cascade tuning on control loop performance is analyzed in the framework of a monitoring system implemented in a refinery plant. Improper (too conservative) tuning of the inner loop may bring to ambiguous or apparently wrong verdicts on the evaluation of single loop performance. Starting from the evidence that operators actions can be different from suggestions given by the monitor...

Legal scholars, legislators, policy advocates, and the news media frequently use jury verdicts to draw conclusions about the performance of the tort system. However actual payouts can differ greatly from verdicts. We report evidence on post-verdict payouts from the most comprehensive longitudinal study of matched jury verdicts and payouts. Using data on all insured medical malpractice claims in...

judicial reconsideration refers to the process that should obligations of parties of a contract become unequal due to some unexpected accident, the judge would reconsider articles of the contract on the basis of a general judgment in the law, a juristic rule, or verdicts of jurists. there are some opinions as to justification of judicial reconsideration some of which being that of implicit cond...

Two inpatients of one hospital ward died. Pilocarpine poisoning was suspected and subsequently confirmed by analysis of urine. The circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that the food given to the patients in the ward had been adulterated. Police inquiries failed to elicit any further information, and open verdicts were returned at the inquest. Precautions taken subsequently to prevent a si...

Scientists, in contrast, rarely speak of verdicts. To the scientist, virtually all conclusions are provisional and subject to revision as new data become available. Much of what is believed to be true turns out, after the collection of more information, to be only partially true, conditionally true, or sometimes outright false.1 It is, therefore, most prudent to withhold final judgment until al...

Consider a society in which the production and enforcement of law is entirely private. Individuals contract with rights enforcement firms to protect their rights and arrange for the settlement of legal disputes to which they are a party. Each pair of enforcement firms contracts with an arbitration agency, a private court, to settle disputes between their customers, agreeing to accept and enforc...

In the context of intelligent disclosure of case law, we report on our findings on methods for retrieving relevant case law within the domain of tort law from a repository of 68.000 court verdicts. We apply a thesaurus-based technique to find specific legal situations. It appears that statistical measures of term relevance are not sufficient, but that explicit knowledge about specific formulati...