The use of AvertD, a genetic test to assess an individual’s risk of developing opioid use disorder, will expose physicians to liability. Critics of the test argue that the test itself is unreliable, often resulting in false positives, which will lead to potential undertreatment of pain, and false negatives, which will lead to inappropriate opioid prescriptions. But if the test is available, physicians will use it. And often, due to a combination of genetic determinism and genetic illiteracy, physicians will rely on the test to make opioid prescription decisions without also looking to the environmental, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and other factors that contribute to an individual’s opioid use disorder risk.

Genetic test results that purport to predict opioid use disorder — or really, any behavioral or psychiatric trait or diagnosis — may have enormous consequences for individual lives. When patients are harmed by physicians’ negligent clinical decision making, they can often turn to tort law for a remedy. This article covers various physician liability scenarios, from inappropriate prescribing based on genetic test results to failure to test and informed consent issues. Physicians could face liability for prescribing opioids after a positive test result, or for denying pain medication due to false positive test results, or for prescribing opioids to patients despite negative results that prove false, or for failing to administer the test at all. This article concludes that existing tort frameworks offer insufficient protection for patients and fail to ensure appropriate integration of these tests into clinical practice. And relying on tort law will not mitigate the individual and societal harms raised by the introduction of a polygenic risk score test for opioid use disorder.

Frank Knight’s work is examined through the lens provided by the posthumous publication of his essay “Economic History” in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas in 1973. Knight identified pivotal ideas in economics from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations until the time of his retirement from the University of Chicago, with some recognition of earlier contributions. The priority he gave to liberty within economics shows in the connection between Adam Smith and American independence. He then worked his way chronologically through a consideration of eight “moments” from classical economics, almost all declared errors. After identifying marginalism with the turn to economic science in three moments, he identified fifteen more moments that led to the development of a science focused on entrepreneurs and enterprises. Knight’s conclusion provides brief mention of six movements that claimed to conflict with economics, although Knight argued that none of them actually conflict.

Every US state requires drivers to pass a knowledge and skills examination before obtaining their driver’s license. Surprisingly little is known about the progression of people through the examination process. To date, no research has been conducted on the proportion of individuals who pass from one stage of the driver examination process to the next compared to those who fail and are required to be reexamined. The purpose of this study was to follow the progression of a cohort of new drivers in Washington State as they advanced through the driver examination process. We reviewed driving records for 2,604 teens who started a driver education course in 2024. Of those who attempted the knowledge test at least once, 96 percent passed their knowledge test and 85 percent passed their skills exam. There were significant differences in pass and fail rates by sex, race, and household income. The overwhelming majority of new drivers passed both the knowledge and skills exams after two attempts. The fact that teenagers have a high risk of crashing in the first year of licensure suggests that the full safety potential of the knowledge and skills exams are not being realized.

In this response to the four contributions to the Critical Forum on Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule, Michael David-Fox reflects on how our own twenty-first century crisis of liberalism may provoke new engagements with the twentieth-century age of extremes. His dialogue with commentators and critics is grouped into four areas. The first concerns how to reconceive the old comparison between Stalinism and Nazism in terms of entanglements and the non-synchronous life cycles of revolutionary regimes of far Left and far Right. The second is an explanation and defense of power and power relations as the work’s overarching focus, acknowledging decisions that entailed in terms of the research agenda. The third represents an intervention into a controversy over evidence, the Mints Commission interviews on the Great Patriotic War, and the utility of memoirs. The last section unpacks and refines the author’s approach to the concepts of choice, decision-making, and agency.

Employer complaints about rising health care costs have been ubiquitous for a number of years. Survey evidence, though, finds widespread employer shortcomings in the processes they use to select and monitor health plan service providers. The evidence provides a data-driven basis to assess whether employers meet their fiduciary obligations, leading to the conclusion that employers need to increase their diligence or face the possibility of significant liability. The increased diligence may also mitigate health care costs.

Patients experiencing pregnancy complications have died after being denied emergency medical treatment in states with restrictive abortion laws even where the laws ostensibly allow pregnancy termination when necessary to save a patient’s life. For patients experiencing miscarriage, premature rupture of membranes, placental abruption, severe hypertensive disorders, ectopic pregnancy, and other conditions, a treating physician’s decision about whether their condition qualifies as an emergency under state law can mean the difference between life and death. Physicians who treat obstetric emergencies report being torn between delivering evidence-based care and protecting themselves from criminal prosecution. This article frames physician decision-making about emergency abortion within the larger institutional context in which those decisions arise, providing a taxonomy of the myriad hospital policies that impact physicians who treat obstetric emergencies. It evaluates these institutional procedures’ efficacy with respect to the dual goals of protecting pregnant patients’ health and limiting providers’ exposure to legal risk. The article concludes that the optimal institutional approach grants full deference to physicians’ clinical judgment while also providing robust institutional support in the form of comprehensive legal guidance and guaranteed legal representation for physicians who are prosecuted for making good faith medical judgments. It calls upon hospitals to re-commit to their primary mission of providing high quality patient care, and to dedicate resources to supporting physicians who deliver evidence-based care despite unrelenting legal and political pressures.

Despite the routine assessment of decisional capacity in the clinical context, the concept of capacity is contested, and its measurement is flawed. For example, scholars and clinicians disagree about the criteria for demonstrating capacity. There is further lack of consensus about whether some types of medical decisions should require more evidence of capacity. Moreover, there is robust literature demonstrating that formal capacity assessment instruments are not always valid and reliable.

This Article focuses on these and other issues, namely the fact that (in)capacity as currently understood is often not viewed relationally and contextually. (In)capacity is viewed as a cognitive property of an individual — an individual has capacity or does not. However, properly conceived, (in)capacity is constituted in interaction with others (e.g., health care providers, family, friends) and one’s environment, and mediated through one’s body and experience of health, illness, or disability. When this reality is not acknowledged, clinicians, caregivers, family members, and others miss opportunities to strengthen patients’ decisional capacity by modifying how they communicate with patients and by changing patients’ environment to improve decision-making. In fact, not acknowledging the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity likely leads to weakening of patients’ decision-making abilities and the unnecessary disqualification of patients from contemporaneous decision-making, which subsequently negatively affects patient interests in maintaining autonomy and bodily integrity and experiencing wellbeing.

This Article will foreground the relational and contextual nature of (in)capacity and address problems with capacity assessments for adult patients in the medical decision-making context, propose reforms to the capacity assessment process, and conclude by discussing the implications of these arguments in other decision-making contexts.

Section 1 introduces the notion of transcendental arguments as arguments from the necessary conditions of possibility. What distinguishes them from other forms of deductive reasoning is the so-called transcendental conditional of the logical form ‘p is possible only if q’. Section 2 outlines three models for such arguments, analysing transcendental conditionals in terms of material implication, strict implication, and presupposition (semantic and pragmatic). Section 3 considers competing interpretations of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism presented in the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Section 4 summarises the main results of the paper.

This essay compares and contrasts the disciplines of sociology and law and society. I then outline how sociology can enrich law and society with stronger theory-building and better linkages of theoretical frameworks to empirical data. I next consider how law and society can enrich sociology, including by encouraging sociologists to take seriously law’s constitutive nature and to engage more directly with their work’s normative implications. Throughout, I draw primarily on research on U.S. immigration enforcement, which is both my area of study and a site of rich cross-pollination between the two fields.

The present work investigated changes in well-being during the transition out of upper secondary education (i.e., from shortly before graduating from upper secondary education to approximately one year later). The motivation for a post-school pathway (e.g., starting university or vocational training) was examined as a potential predictor of between-person differences in well-being trajectories. German-speaking high school graduates (N = 874 between ages 16 and 20; 69% female, 95% born in Germany) reported on their affective well-being in up to four surveys and indicated their motivation for their post-school pathway. At three measurement occasions, participants also participated in a three-week experience sampling phase, in which they reported on their daily well-being. Latent change models revealed an initial increase in well-being after graduation, but mixed evidence for subsequent trajectories, as both positive and negative affect decreased on average. Changes in well-being were more pronounced for global than for daily assessments of affective well-being. We did not find associations between the motivation for a post-school pathway and well-being trajectories. Overall, these findings highlight the complexity of well-being trajectories during the transition out of upper secondary education and the importance of using multiple time points and assessment methods to understand these dynamics.

We report on a first-principles numerical study of magnetic reconnection in plasmas with different initial ion-to-electron temperature ratios. In cases where this ratio is significantly below unity, we observe intense wave activity in the diffusion region, driven by the ion-acoustic instability. Our analysis shows that the dominant macroscopic effect of this instability is to drive substantial ion heating. In contrast to earlier studies reporting significant anomalous resistivity, we find that anomalous contributions due to the ion-acoustic instability are minimal. These results shed light on the dynamical impact of this instability on reconnection processes, offering new insights into the fundamental physics governing collisionless reconnection.

This article deals with late antique Jewish and Christian discourse on social hierarchy, martyrology, and attitudes toward the law and the commandments. I place Jewish and Christian attitudes to martyrdom in late antiquity within the larger system of the commandments. Beyond the circumstantial connections between martyrdom and the affirmation or violation of laws, I argue that martyrdom constitutes an important lens for the examination of the rule of the law and for the negotiation of socio-religious hierarchies. I argue that the elevation of martyrdom creates inner tension vis-à-vis the idea of life-long righteousness based on adherence to the law. I discuss the construction of martyrdom as the final and ultimate commandment, necessary for reaching a state of perfection. Through addressing a case where martyrdom is presented as competing with, if not substituting, a life according to the law, I discuss the theme of an upside-down world, which appears in both Christian and Rabbinic literature, concerning martyrs. In this framework, I discuss the view of martyrdom as a kind of stairway to heaven—an instrument for rapid advancement allowing to overtake those who lived according to the law—and the unique perception of law and martyrology in the fourth-century Syriac-Christian Book of Steps, which places the martyrs below the perfect.

The moduli space of bundle stable pairs $\overline {M}_C(2,\Lambda )$ on a smooth projective curve C, introduced by Thaddeus, is a smooth Fano variety of Picard rank two. Focusing on the genus two case, we show that its K-moduli space is isomorphic to a GIT moduli of lines in quartic del Pezzo threefolds. Additionally, we construct a natural forgetful morphism from the K-moduli of $\overline {M}_C(2,\Lambda )$ to that of the moduli spaces of stable vector bundles $\overline {N}_C(2,\Lambda )$. In particular, Thaddeus’ moduli spaces for genus two curves are all K-stable.