The American Law Institute’s first ever Restatement of Medical Malpractice law provides an opportunity to examine how generic private law doctrine shapes itself to the distinctive core features of medical care. Various Restatement provisions reflect tort law’s recognition of key features of medical care that justify regarding medical liability as a distinct branch of negligence law. Tort law does so, however, in a somewhat anachronistic manner that regards medical care encounters in a highly individualized fashion -- one that sees patient care encounters as primarily dyadic (simply between doctor and patient), rather than being embedded in complex institutional, professional, regulatory, and economic structures. To some extent, this simplification helps determine legal obligations and enforce patient protections. In other respects, however, tort law has not yet adequately reflected fundamental changes in health care finance and delivery over the past generation or two. The Medical Malpractice Restatement considers these changes and responds to some of them, but not to others. Because a Restatement is, at its core, a synthesis of existing doctrine rather than a law reform enterprise, it is limited in the extent to which it can aim to improve or modernize law. Embedded in the Restatement are a number of key passages that point in potentially constructive directions that future evolution of tort doctrine might take. Other points of doctrinal rigidity, however, might require more overt law reform efforts to overcome.

The aim of this contribution is to briefly summarise the work on the Lewis Hoard of gaming pieces that has taken place since the publication of Vikings in Scotland. From that base, the argument is that the gaming pieces, or chessmen if you prefer, are not Viking; they post-date the Viking Age by at least a century. They are not a guide to the Viking economy, but viewed as a performance mechanism we can perhaps suggest that the Lewis Hoard helped to recall or reassemble a Viking Past, updated within newer political and social realities.

This helps to signal a reframing of the discussion of the hoard in the context of the assembly and reassembly of objects – concepts borrowed from, but not exclusive to, ethnographic and colonial studies (for example, Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Harrison, Byrne and Clarke 2013; Hamilakis and Jones 2017; Wingfield 2017 and with the key impetus for the approach, Latour 2005) – which help to emphasise both the affective, material qualities of things and their symbolic, representational ones. It underlies one of the key objectives in reassessing the Lewis Hoard: to raise awareness of it as an act, or rather several acts, of assembly or accumulation, with temporal depth both in its accumulation (probably through gift-giving episodes) and in its heirloom capacity to store and pass on generational knowledge (its later reassembly through its discovery, dissemination and affective influence on cultural practice will not be dealt with here, but see, for example, Caldwell and Hall 2018). This heirloom reflex around gaming pieces can be seen on a grander, institutional scale in Continental church treasuries and fittings (Kluge-Pinsker 1991: 34–5; Hall, Graham-Campbell and Petts, forthcoming). The assembly of the Lewis Hoard may have taken place in what came to be a Gaelic cultural milieu, one which hybridised Scandinavian cultural elements through generational inheritance and through adoption (for example, see Hall 2017). The affective, tangible agency of such pieces (including heraldry and colour) is discussed in Tate et al. 2014, Hall 2014 and Forsyth and Hall 2020.

Vikings in Scotland

‘Earls and Bishops’ is the final, thirteenth, chapter of Graham-Campbell and Batey’s Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey and concludes with a coda (pp. 263–4) on the Lewis chessmen (Figure 19.1) in which they accepted the long-standing view that the pieces were a merchant’s stock of the second half of the 12th century.

Connecticut’s Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth were among the most important participants in the War for Independence, the Constitutional Convention, and the First Federal Congress. As well, both served on their state’s Superior Court, and Ellsworth was chief drafter of the Judiciary Act of 1789 and Chief Justice of the United States from 1796–1800. Their religious convictions, informed by Reformed theology, influenced their contributions to the creation of America’s constitutional order, and they represent well the 50–75% of Americans in this era who Calvinists.