Le procès pénal du Mediator® et ses implications concernant les différents ordres de juridiction

The long-awaited judgment issued about the Mediator case by the 31st criminal court of the Tribunal de grande instance de Paris will not be the last one. The public prosecutor, as well as Servier and some of the victims have called for the appeal. Nevertheless, the number of victims reflects the extent of damage caused by this medicine. The complexity of the procedure highlights the specificities of the civil and administrative jurisdictions, as well as the transactional process. The purpose is to study the main points related to this articulation.     

Un point sur la responsabilité civile du fait des prothèses

The evolutions of the medical liability depend on the walking (step) of the jurisprudence, and on that of the European law. Crossings renewed the reflection on the consequences of the protheses failures, and make paradoxically return to the contractual obligation.     

An Alternative Solution to Lifting the Ban on Doping: Breaking the Payoff Matrix of Professional Sport by Shifting Liability Away from Athletes

The persistence of doping in professional sports—either by individuals on an isolated basis and by whole teams as part of a systematic doping programme—means that professional sport today is rarely if ever untainted. There are financial incentives in place that incentivise doping and there are data that show that doping is often a systematic, organised enterprise (either at team-level, or at state-level). The main question to be answered today in professional sports is whether doping’s repressive anti-doping policies do not have greater negative consequences for society. Whilst some have suggested legitimising safe doping under medical control, in this paper, I argue that doing so will do little to prevent clandestine use of dangerous performance-enhancing substances, and suggest an alternative solution to lifting the ban on doping, i.e. starting from extending liability for doping in sport beyond athletes to those holding power and authority over athletes, to changing winning incentives for doping, to making sport sustainable in the longer time by devising ways of providing athletes with a steady income which is not linked to record breaking or sponsorships.     

Terror and Collateral Damage: Are they Permissible?*

This article begins by comparing terror and death and then focuses on whether killing combatants and noncombatants as a mere means to create terror, that is in turn a means to winning a war, is ever permissible. The role of intentions and alternative acts one might have done is examined in this regard. The second part of the article begins by criticizing a standard justification for causing collateral (side effect) deaths in war and offers an alternative justification that makes use of the idea of group liability. * This article is a shortened version of my “Failures of Just War Theory: Terror, Harm, and Justice,” Ethics 114 (July 2004), pp. 650–694, with the addition of new material on the use of terror in Section 2.     

从伦理和经济的角度对医疗行为责任的立法建议

从伦理和经济的角度论述了医疗行为责任立法的必要性,阐明了该法的性质;立法的价值取向是充分保护医疗服务接受者的权利,并兼顾社会利益;提出了创建<医疗行为责任法>的具体建议.     

Scientific misconduct: Present problems and future trends

Substantial progress in handling scientific misconduct cases has been made since the first cases were investigated by the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity in 1989. The successor Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has simultaneously reduced the backlog of cases and increased the professionalism with which they are handled. However, a spate of lawsuits against universities, particularly those brought under the federal False Claims Act, threatens to undermine the ORI by encouraging use of the courts as an alternate route for resolving claims of research misconduct. Next steps should include establishing a government-wide definition of scientific misconduct, providing immunity from lawsuits for institutions that follow proper procedures in investigating charges of scientific misconduct, and participating in the development of international guidelines for maintaining scientific integrity. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the symposium entitled “Misconduct in Science: A Decade of Progress or Merely Years of Controversy” held during the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 13 February, 1998.     

论医疗违约行为的认定及其标准

医疗违约以医师在诊疗过程中不履行或不完全履行其医疗债务为表现形式。然而，医疗债务属于手段债务，对其不完全履行无法从结果上判断，而只能从履行过程上判断是否违反诊疗义务。因此，医疗违约的认定首先应明确医疗合同中诊疗义务的具体内容，并在此基础上采取一定的标准和方法判定医师的诊疗行为是否构成违约。鉴于合同法上传统的违约认定方法并不适用于医疗合同，应考虑将医疗水平确立为违约的认定标准，并谨慎应对其适用中可能存在的问题。     

Disjunction Between Probability and Verdict in Juror Decision Making

Although the law assumes a close relation between the probability that a defendant committed the act in question and the ensuing verdict of the jurors, prior research has shown this assumption to be often violated. We present five experiments designed to show that factors that influence probability also influence verdict, but other factors are capable of directly producing changes in verdict without affecting probability. In Experiment 1, we replicated the Wells Effect; scenarios generating the same probability that the Blue Bus Company was to blame for the same accident, nevertheless, generated significantly different likelihoods of finding the defendant liable. In Experiment 2, we showed that equally diagnostic affirmative and negative evidence had differential effects on mock jurors' probability estimates and verdicts. In Experiment 3, we showed that a completely nondiagnostic witness, who either implicates the same bus company or a different bus company as did a diagnostic witness, significantly influenced mock jurors' verdicts. However, the nondiagnostic witness did not change the probability that the Blue Bus Company was responsible for the accident. In Experiment 4, we demonstrated that base rate and witness reliability information resulted in very similar probability estimates but radically different verdicts. In Experiment 5, we showed that a change in the diagnosticity of the evidence influenced both probability and verdict with the former mediating differences in the later. Because probability is only one of the several determinants of the verdict, the two dependent variables are not as closely related as the law presumes. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Embolie gazeuse cérébrale lors d’une séance d’hémodialyse : aspects médico-légaux : à propos d’une affaire judiciaire

Air embolism is a serious iatrogenic event, concerning many invasive medical therapies. It is a rare but life-threatening adverse event. We report a case of a cerebral air embolism occurring during a renal replacement therapy. We report the case of a court case analyzed in the Department of Legal Medicine of Farhat Hached University Hospital in Sousse, Tunisia, related to a cerebral gas embolism occurring during a session of renal replacement therapy. Then we discuss the medical liability of the medical team involved in this act. Through a draft organic law (law No. 41/2019 on patients’ rights and medical liability), Tunisian jurisprudence aims at resolving legal claims in the field of medical liability by providing more opportunities for an amicable solution and by guaranteeing an adequate and quick compensation of the damage suffered.     

Contamination transfusionnelle et relations sexuelles non protégées : les limites du droit à indemnisation du transfusé au titre de la solidarité nationale (Civ., 1re, 22 janvier 2014, no 12-35023, FS P+B+I)

A patient victim of HIV infection by transfusion who knowingly maintained sexual relation with his spouse cannot receive compensation for moral prejudice in the case of his spouse and daughter's contamination. The request for compensation addressed to the ONIAM on the grounds of the articles L. 1142-22 and L. 3122-1 of the Public Health Code must therefore be rejected.