An unusual case of post-mortem redistribution of ethanol

We report an unusual case of post-mortem redistribution of ethanol in a woman diver who died by drowning in seawater. The ethanol concentrations were right heart blood 0.60 g/l, left heart blood 2.08 g/l, femoral venous blood 0.63 g/l, gastric contents 5.87 g/l, bile 0.83 g/l. The mechanisms of post-mortem redistribution of ethanol described in the literature, that is, early redistribution from the stomach or the lung parenchyma in the case of inhalation of gastric contents, are inadequate to account for the degree of variation observed between the measurements. We believe that this difference in concentration is explained by the presence of seawater in the pulmonary alveoli at the time of death.     

Right,Crime, and Court: Toward a Unifying Political Conception of International Law

It is widely acknowledged that human rights law (hereafter, HRL) and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) share core normative features. Yet, the literature has not yet reconstructed this underlying basis in a systematic way. In this contribution, I lay down the basis of such an account. I first identify a similar tension between a “moral” and a “political” approach to the normative foundations of those norms and to the legitimate role of international courts (hereafter, ICs) and tribunals adjudicating those norms. With a view to bring the debate forward, I then turn to the practices of HRL and international criminal law (hereafter, ICL) to examine which of those approaches best illuminates some salient aspects of the adjudication of ICs. Finally, I argue that the political approach best explains the practice. While each preserves a distinct role, HRL and ICL both establish the basic conditions for the primary subject of international law (HRL and ICL, for the purpose of this article), namely the state, to legitimately govern its own subjects constructed as free and equal moral agents.     

French ‘officiers ministériels’: autonomy of the legal professions,protection of their market and an ambivalent relationship with the state

The occupational status of officier ministériel which applies to auctioneers (commissaires-priseurs), bailiffs (huissiers de justice) and notaries (notaires) goes back to the Ancien Régime and continues to embody a remarkable example of a typically French model for structuring professions: officiers ministériels are both the repositories of a slice of public authority and the self-employed members of a profession. This unique status is still upheld by the French state which determines the conditions for entering as well as exercising these professions (granting of monopolies, setting certain fees and competitive practices, etc.). But after having survived intact for so long, the construction of a legal and judicial European space in the second half of the twentieth century has accelerated the transformation of certain professional groups reflected in an entrepreneurial approach and changing business models. Professional representative bodies have also largely contributed to these changes by managing to thwart programmes and political decisions through a wide range of development or resistance strategies.     

COVID 19: how coercive were the coercive measures taken to fight the pandemic

European Journal of Law and Economics - Preventive detention legislation allows for the ongoing detention of an offender’s sentence. We explore the effects of pretrial detention on case...     

A New Tool for Coding and Interpreting Injuries in Fatal Airplane Crashes: The Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool Application to the Air France Flight AF447 Disaster (Rio de Janeiro–Paris), 1st of June 2009

For investigation of air disasters, crash reconstruction is obtained using data from flight recorders, physical evidence from the site, and injuries patterns of the victims. This article describes a new software, Crash Injury Pattern Assessment Tool (CIPAT), to code and analyze injuries. The coding system was derived from the Abbreviated Injury Score (AIS). Scores were created corresponding to the amount of energy required causing the trauma (ER), and the software was developed to compute summary variables related to the position (assigned seat) of victims. A dataset was built from the postmortem examination of 154/228 victims of the Air France disaster (June 2009), recovered from the Atlantic Ocean after a complex and difficult task at a depth of 12790 ft. The use of CIPAT allowed to precise cause and circumstances of deaths and confirmed major dynamics parameters of the crash event established by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority.     

The European elections of 1994

Legislatures frequently enact primary legislation that delegates secondary law making powers to administrative agencies. Judicial review designed to ensure that this secondary legislation is in accord with the primary legislation necessarily involves judicial interpretation of the primary legislation and hence also some degree of judicial law making. Both the relative degree of judicial law making and its causes may vary from country to country. Judicial review of secondary legislation in three countries is examined. Judicial activism is great in the United States and probably related both to congressional inefficiency in passing amending statutes and judicial recruitment and career patterns. The level of judicial activism in the UK has been low but may be increasing. It is severely constrained by the capacity of parliament rapidly to 'correct' judicial interpretations but encouraged by judicial career patterns. The formal decisions of the French Council of State show little judicial intervention against administrators' secondary legislation but such intervention may occur extensively at the stage of agency regulation drafting rather than through formal review processes.     

Persons and things: an ethnographic analogy

This article explores some parallels between the ethnographies of Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour. More precisely, it distinguishes Latour's models of a symmetrical alliance between humans and non-humans from Strathern's conception of an ethnographic analogy,which finds (in the context of Melanesia) a mode of social action that is indifferent to the modern distinction between persons and things. This theoretical inquiry takes as its theme the question of the ownership of genetic tissues, which not only affords a topical, concrete, context for the exploration of theoretical issues, but also offers a persuasive illustration of the critique of 'symmetry' that unfolds from the perspective of Strathern's ethnographic analogy.