The idea of autonomy and the foundations of contractual liability

This paper examines a recurrent debate about the rationale of contractual liability: whether the central object of contract law is to facilitate human interaction by respecting individual choices, or if it is in large part to redistribute wealth, power, and advantages generally. The debate between defenders of freedom of contract and those who would use contract law to advance schemes of redistribution is connected to the long-standing issues between natural-law theories and legal positivism. This paper is divided into two main sections. In the first, the notion of individual autonomy is examined in light of the classical view, most recently advanced by Fried, that the rationale for enforcing contracts is connected to the respect for individual autonomy as such. There is also an examination of the notion of a collective concern, and what it is, from a libertarian point of view, that makes some social goals objectionably collective. The second part of the paper argues that the use of collective resources for the enforcement of contracts brings with it the authority to limit and shape enforcement in the interest of redistribution.     

Finland's penal colonies: The forbearant model and community-based corrections

Community-based corrections is widely heralded as the proper basis for future penal administration. Penal colonies of Finland are employed in this paper to relate changes in society at large to innovation in corrections. The penal colonies were the indirect result of the postwar crisis in Finland and changes brought by industrialization and urbanization. Unprecedented opportunities for solving problems of conventional administration motivated officials to introduce penal colonies as a means of accomodating prisons to the new expectations being imposed on correctional work. The forbearant model is proposed as a hesitant and primitive reaction to pressures to bring corrections into conformity with the trends shaping society at large. This model is useful in analyses of the American movement toward community-based corrections.     

The art of regulation and the regulation of ART: the impact of regulation on research and clinical practice

How a society regulates Assisted Reproduction Technologies (ART) depends on cultural context. The challenge for the regulatory regime is to balance protection for patients and society with freedom for medico-scientific creativity. Neither an exclusively market-regulated nor a peer-regulated approach is realistic politically, or desirable socially, ethically and legally. Legitimate social issues that go beyond the exclusive expertise of doctors and scientists or market choice by patients need to be accommodated within the regulatory regime. Within this context, four key issues are discussed: the lack of a shared social ethic that helps the needs of the community to be balanced against those of its individual members; the negative impact of intrusive external regulation on scientists and doctors; the requirement for doctors and scientists to review their professional structures reflectively and critically if they are to be entrusted with peer-regulation; and the desirability of constructive dialogue between regulators and regulated rather than the use of coercion and criminal sanctions.     

Analysis of postmortem DNA degradation by single-cell gel electrophoresis

One of the most important longstanding problems in the field of forensic medicine is the determination of the time of death upon the discovery of a possible homicide victim. With a majority of homicide victims discovered within the first 48h, it is critically important to be able to determine time of death quickly, and with accuracy and precision. Current methods of determining postmortem interval (PMI) vary, but none can provide better than an 8-h window time estimate. In this paper, the potential application of single-cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE), also known as the comet assay, to evaluate postmortem cell death processes, specifically nuclear DNA fragmentation, is assessed. Upon the death of an organism, internal nucleases contained within the cells should cause chromosomal DNA to degrade into increasingly smaller fragments over time, and if these fragments can be isolated and visualized, the fragmentation should prove to be measurable and quantifiable. An original study providing proof of the concept of postmortem DNA fragmentation between early and late time periods was conducted using human leukocytes. With an established trend seen in the leukocyte results, this study was then expanded using a porcine animal model, over a longer time period, with more frequent time-points evaluated. DNA degradation in all samples was revealed by SCGE and quantified by the use of DNA-specific quantitative stains, as measured by digital camera affixed to a microscope. The comet 'tail-moment' gave a measure of the proportion of fragmented to non-fragmented DNA, while the 'tail-length' provided the relative size of degraded DNA fragments. In both models, an increase in DNA fragmentation was found to correlate with an increased PMI from 0 to 56h postmortem, as evaluated by comet-tail-moment and by comet-tail-length, with tail-length providing the strongest statistical correlation, based upon regression analysis. The postmortem DNA fragmentation observed in this study, reveals a sequential, time-dependent process with the potential for use as a predictor of PMI in homicide cases.