Showing papers on "Damages published in 1968"

Actuarial Assessment of Damages

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to provide an opportunity for discussion within our profession of ‘the use of an actuarial approach and actuarial evidence’ in the assessment of damages arising out of personal injury and fatal accident litigation. The need for such a paper was intimated in the pages of our Journal by William Phillips in his Review of Principles of the Law of Damages by Professor Harry Street. Since the publication of what Phillips described as ‘from the actuarial point of view…the most important legal textbook which has been published in the last 50 years’ the employment of actuaries in this field has been widely discussed within the legal profession. The most important recent development has been the inclusion of personal injury litigation as Item VI of the first programme of the Law Commission set up by the Law Commission Act, 1965. The words quoted in the first sentence above are taken from the list of ‘Questions for Examination’ under (b) of Item VI, ‘Assessment of Damages’. The current examination being conducted by the Law Commission makes this a particularly appropriate time for a sessional meeting on this subject. The writer has had the advantage of a sight of a preliminary Working Paper prepared by the Law Commission and will be quoting certain extracts from that paper below. It must however be stressed that the Working Paper is a preliminary one which attempts to do no more than canvass views: it in no way sets out the conclusions of the Law Commission on the matters discussed.

Constitutional Liberty and the Law of Libel: A Historian's View

Abstract: J T is somewhat surprising that constitutional historians have paid little or no attention to the development of the law of libel since the crisis occasioned by the Sedition Act of I798. The history of seditious libel as it related to the growing eighteenth-century crisis over freedom of speech and press has received extensive treatment from the profession. But historians appear to have assumed that with the expiration of the I798 law and with the rapid decline thereafter of the frequency and significance of prosecutions for seditious libel in the several states, libel law ceased to have any great significance for the growth of American constitutional liberty. Any such assumption is in large part erroneous. Rather, what actually happened was that with the declining significance of state and federal prosecutions for criminal libel, actions for damages under the law of civil libel assumed increasing importance as a means of controlling false, reckless, and defamatory utterances, both in politics and public life and in the private affairs of men. As the Illinois Supreme Court observed nearly fifty years

Application of risk criteria in coastal engineering

Abstract: A design of any engineering structure may be said to be optimum when it can meet all the necessary requirements at a minimum possible cost. In all cases there is a probability, however slight (sometimes even incalculable because of lack of data), that the design load can be exceeded and, thus, damages could occur. Obviously, lower the design load, higher would be the cost of anticipated damages and vice versa. Thus, from economical standpoint alone, the ideal solution would be when the total cost of construction and anticipated damages is at its minimum. Very often, however, other factors like social, political, etc., have to be considered, and this makes the whole process a complex decision making problem - sometimes completely out of the jurisdiction of the engineers.