Distorting Vicarious Liability

The note considers the decision of the Court of Appeal in Maga v The Trustees of the Birmingham Archdiocese of the Roman Catholic Church and analyses the application of the status based risk approach to vicarious liability in that case. It considers its application outside of the area of clerical sexual abuse, and also the role in vicarious liability of job conferred status which materially increases the risk of the commission of a tort, or helps to facilitate a tort.     

Snitching,Lies and Computer Crashes: An Experimental Investigation of Secondary Confessions

Two laboratory studies with 332 student participants investigated secondary confessions (provided by an informant instead of the suspect). Participants allegedly caused or witnessed a simulated computer crash, then were asked to give primary or secondary confessions during interrogation. Study 1 replicated the false evidence effect for primary confessions. Secondary confessions were obtained at a high rate, which was increased by false evidence in combination with incentive to confess. In Study 2 a confederate either confessed to or denied crashing the computer. Incentive increased the rate of secondary confession only in the presence of a denial; that is, incentive increased the number of false secondary confessions only. Implications for the use of incentives during informant interrogation are discussed.     

Two Cultures,Two Different Shows

I am now yearning for my second home.China,you are very hard to get out of one’s system,and I will return in a couple of weeks!I have just spent three months back in Australia,where the cost of living is so high that it is almost impossible to live without a second source of income.Fortunately,in my case this comes from my writing.While in Australia I negotiated two contracts,one of which was     

THE PROSPECT OF ESTABLISHING A TRUTH- TELLING AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION IN UGANDA

While eulogising former President Apollo Milton Obote, President Museveni argued that the time had come to look for ways to bring genuine reconciliation in the country. Since then, in the context of ending the conflict in northern Uganda, calls have been made for the government to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission （TRC） to heal not only the wounds occasioned by that conflict, but also those that have been inflicted in the whole country since independence. In this regard, specific recommendations have been made on the need to establish a TRC once and for all to deal with Uganda＇s past. However, the talk of reconciliation has been heard before. Former dictator Idi Amin instituted a commission in 1974 to look into the disappearance of people in the early years of his rule in 1974, but its recommendations were never implemented. When he took over in 1986, MusevenL in order to show that his government was different from those before, established a commission to look into violations of human rights from independence up to the day he took over. Very few recommendations of this commission were ever implemented. This paper argues that there is momentum to establish a TRC in Uganda, which should deal with the conflict not only in northern Uganda but rather should be national in outlook. This is because there are events that have occurred since independence in the country that need closure. Also, it is the contention of this paper that in order to be successful, any future TRC must learn from the experiences of past commissions.     

Beyond reason: the philosophy and politics of immigration

In this paper, I critically address the role of arbitrary and contingent features in philosophical debates about migration. These features play a central role, and display the importance of ‘unreason’ in the debate and the limits of rational criticism. Certain elements of political thought have to be taken as given, as essential starting points or indispensable building blocks. As such, they cannot be exposed to rational criticism. Political arrangements such as national borders, nation-states and national identities constitute these building blocks, and justify coercive borders in order to sustain them. If we are to subject these arrangements to critical examination, then we move beyond the limits of liberal political philosophy. I examine theorists who take this kind of approach to the ethics of immigration: Michael Blake, Samuel Scheffler and David Miller. I argue that such approaches ask us to balance arbitrary and contingent features of the political world against the non-contingent moral equality of the migrant. If we are to recognize the migrant as an equal reason-giver in the moral contestation of borders, then we are compelled to theorize beyond these limits, and to theorize instead about a global community of equals, a post-national world made up of transnational belonging.     

Comparative Analysis of the HV1 and HV2 Regions of Human Mitochondrial DNA by Denaturing High-Performance Liquid Chromatography

Abstract:  Denaturing high-performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) was evaluated as a sequencing-independent means of detecting the presence of sequence differences in pair-wise mixtures of nonconcordant amplicons of human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). A total of 920 pair-wise combinations of HV1 and HV2 mtDNA amplicons from 95 individuals were assayed by DHPLC for sequence concordance/nonconcordance. For the 72 combinations of amplicons from different individuals who shared identical DNA sequences, DHPLC assays consistently indicated sequence concordance between the samples. This was in 100% agreement with sequencing data. For the 849 combinations of amplicons which differed in sequence, DHPLC detected the presence of sequence nonconcordance in all but 13 assays to yield 98.5% concordance with sequencing. Thus, DHPLC can be used to detect a diversity of sequence differences (transitions, transversions, insertions, and deletions) in the mtDNA D-loop. Accordingly, DHPLC may have utility as a presumptive indicator of mtDNA sequence concordance samples, as a screen for heteroplasmy/situational mixtures, and as a means for the physical fractionation of the individual contributors to an mtDNA mixture prior to sequencing.