scholarly journals Apples to Oranges? Gendered Damages in Personal Injury Litigation: A Focus on Infant Claims

2018 ◽  
pp. 207
Author(s):  
Kathleen Renaud

For infant plaintiffs, personal injury litigation damage awards for loss of earning capacity are highly speculative. To quantify damages, courts rely on general population statistics and often consider the gender of the plaintiff. This article examines ways in which courts have discounted damages to minor female plaintiffs. The author notes that this discounting broadly occurs in two ways, through the use of gendered statistics and through the application of female specific contingencies. While the courts have justified gender specific damages on the basis that tort law aims to be corrective, the author argues that these practices are no more appropriate than reducing damage awards based on factors such as race or ethnicity. The author concludes that tort law is capable of evolution and it is time that the practice of gender based damages be retired.

Author(s):  
Vera Bermingham ◽  
Carol Brennan

Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. Questions, diagrams, and exercises help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress. Tort law is designed to address the consequences of loss. This is accomplished mainly through compensation and deterrence. A third aim of tort law is corrective justice. This chapter discusses the compensation aim of tort law, focusing on personal injury caused by accidents. It examines whether this aim has been successfully accomplished and considers the relative merits of other forms of compensation. After providing a historical overview of the tort system of compensation, the chapter looks at the function of tort as a form of compensation for loss and places tort in the context of other forms of compensation. It also analyses insurance, no-fault liability, and alternative compensation schemes before ending with a discussion of current debates concerning possible high levels of personal injury litigation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S1) ◽  
pp. s105-s105 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Bloem ◽  
A. Miller

BackgroundRecent reports have highlighted the health disparities that women and other vulnerable populations experience following disasters. Humanitarian groups have struggled to implement effective measures to mitigate such disparities during subsequent disasters.ObjectivesTo analyze and provide practical solutions to mitigate barrier's to women's health encountered in Haiti following the 7.0 magnitude earthquake in January 2010.MethodsIn February 2010, a New York based team of emergency and international medicine specialists staffed the mobile emergency department in Port au Prince at L'Hôpital de l'Université d'Etat d'Haïti.ResultsCommon presentations included infectious diseases, traumatic injuries, chronic disease exacerbations, and follow-up for earthquake-associated conditions. Female gender-specific problems included vaginal infections, breast pain or masses, pregnancy-related concerns, and the effects of gender-based violence. Identified barriers to effective gender-specific care included communication, camp geography, supply availability, and poor inter-organization communication.DiscussionRecent disasters in Haiti, Pakistan, and elsewhere have challenged the international health community to provide gender-balanced healthcare in sub-optimal environments. Much room for improvement remains. Although our assessment team was gender-balanced, improved incorporation of Haitian personnel may have enhanced patient trust, and improved cultural sensitivity and communication. Camp geography should foster both patient privacy and security during sensitive examinations. This could have been improved upon by geographically separating men's and women's treatment areas and using a barrier screen to generate a more private examination environment. Women's health supplies must include an appropriate exam table, emergency obstetrical and midwifery supplies, urine dipsticks, and sanitary and reproductive health supplies. A referral system must be established for patients requiring a higher level-of-care. Lastly, improved inter-organization communication and promotion of resource pooling may improve treatment access and quality for select gender-based interventions.ConclusionSimple inexpensive modifications to organized post-disaster medical relief settings may dramatically reduce gender-based healthcare disparities.


The Lancet ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 331 (8596) ◽  
pp. 1236-1237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Brahams

Author(s):  
Gabriela Mesquita Borges ◽  
Rita Faria

The current chapter will allow a better understanding of refugee women's situation in global-forced migration. It also offers a comprehensive account of the ways in which refugee women's experiences of violence are shaped by gendered relations and structures. Furthermore, the chapter will analyze the interactions between the gender identity formation of men and women, the context of escape, displacement and asylum seeking, and the experience or manifestation of gender-based violence against refugee women. Finally, it also intends to illustrate how structural and symbolic violence and power relations cooperate to shape experiences of violence for refugee women and how it can influence and perpetuate interpersonal violence. In this sense, several studies are presented that demonstrate, on one hand, how gender relations are affected by escape, displacement, and asylum, and how they can create different practices of structural and symbolic violence; and, on the other hand, draw attention to the current lack of gender-specific analysis of the problem of asylum and refugees.


Legal Studies ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lewis

Schemes for compensating injury which operate alongside each other call for important policy decisions to be made concerning their inter-relationship. Are they to take account of one another and, if so, to what extent? These issues can arise in a variety of contexts. Within particular regimes they are the concern, for example, of the overlapping benefit regulations in social security law and the rules relating to contribution in insurance law. However, the focus of this article is upon personal injury litigation. It examines the policy reasons which have been used to justify the different results reached by the law when faced with the problem of ‘collateral benefits’ received by an accident victim also seeking damages. Typically, these benefits are received from the state, or an employer, or an insurer.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
P Vasuki ◽  
Divya Bharati R

The real challenge in human-computer interaction is understanding human emotions by machines and responding to it accordingly. Emotion varies by gender and age of the speaker, location, and cause. This article focuses on the improvement of emotion recognition (ER) from speech using gender-biased influences in emotional expression. The problem is addressed by testing emotional speech with an appropriate specific-gender ER system. As acoustical characteristics vary among the genders, there may not be a common optimal feature set across both genders. Gender-based speech emotion recognition, a two-level hierarchical ER system is proposed, where the first level is gender identification which identifies the gender, and the second level is a gender-specific ER system, trained with an optimal feature set of expressions of a particular gender. The proposed system increases the accuracy of traditional Speech Emotion Recognition Systems (SER) by 10.36% than the SER trained with mixed gender training when tested on the EMO-DB Corpus.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (6-7) ◽  
pp. 531-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sid P. Jordan ◽  
Gita R. Mehrotra ◽  
Kiyomi A. Fujikawa

In 2013, the Violence Against Women Act became one of the first federal laws to explicitly prohibit discrimination against transgender people, yet little is known about its impact in practice. This qualitative study draws on in-depth interviews with transgender people working in domestic and sexual violence advocacy organizations. Building on critical and intersectional perspectives, the findings suggest that the persistence of inequities for trans survivors are tied to the reliance on criminal legal responses, contingent access to gender-specific services, compliance-focused approaches to inclusion, operating theories of gender-based violence, and the diversion of responsibility to LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) programs. This study highlights the participants’ recommendations for change.


2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Maidment Kershner

SummaryRecognition of liability in negligence for personal injury, whether physical or psychiatric, is a question of public policy par excellence. In English tort law, public policy is a transparent judicial requirement in fixing liability even when negligence is established otherwise. In considering the tortious liability of a local authority to children in its care, the English House of Lords has, in obiter dicta, raised doubts as a matter of public policy concerning the enforceability of claims for damages by children against a parent for emotional neglect causing psychiatric injury. In Israel, by contrast, the Supreme Court recently extended tortious liability by enforcing the parental duty of care to children through a claim for psychiatric injury. So far Israeli law is unique in this development. Variations in judicial policy concerning the recognition of claims by children for psychiatric injury are considered here, in the contexts of English tort law, and Israeli, US and European human rights law.


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