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In order to succeed in an action under the Equal Pay Act 1970, should the woman and the man be employed by the same employer on like work at the same time or would the woman still be covered by the Act if she were employed on like work in succession to the man? This is the question which had to be solved in Macarthys Ltd v. Smith. Unfortunately it was not. Their Lordships interpreted the relevant section in different ways and since Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome was also subject to different interpretations, the case has been referred to the European Court of Justice.

The use of “schedules of damages” to establish compensation amounts for injured parties appears to be more common in European personal injury or death compensation situations than in the similar legal situations in the United States. The major exception to this statement is the state-based system of workers’ compensation covering employer liability in personal injury and death claims in the United States. Other chapters in this book largely concentrate on comparisons between the uses of Ogden Table multipliers in awarding pecuniary damages in the United Kingdom compared to actuarial methods for calculating such damages in the United States. The two chapters dealing with non-pecuniary damages and scheduled awards deal with methods used to award such damages in the United States and in Europe in individual civil torts. This chapter provides an overview of a number of scheduled damages schemes in both the United States and Europe for the purpose of comparison. The schemes selected address both general and special damages.

The four sections to this article have distinct but inter‐related objectives. Part I introduces the concepts, problems and tensions central to an understanding of the product liability debate. These issues recur throughout the article. Part II outlines the development of product liability law in Europe and assesses the impact of the European Directive on Product Liability. The “product liability crisis” in the United States is discussed in Part III, which looks at the law's development and proposals for reform. In Part IV the United States and European positions are compared and the case is made out for a global uniform product liability law which recognises the social responsibility of the producer towards those injured by his products.

All of the above proposals are realities in Western Europe, and it is suggested that the adoption of such “reforms” would substantially reduce the transaction costs of providing compensation to deserving plaintiffs, improve the efficiency of the tort system, and provide manufacturers and service providers with greater predictability and “fairness” in potential tort damages in the United States.

A personal injury claim for compensation is one of the most common kinds of litigation in Hong Kong. In recent years, a number of cases have emerged which involve accidents resulting from mismanagement of buildings and, in particular, in which the unit owners within the buildings were held liable to pay a portion of the damages. The relevant court cases, relating to domestic property, are researched, to find out the amounts of damages awarded, the effects of the compensations on individual unit owners in the relevant buildings and on their return on investment and the factors that may affect the investment. This kind of litigation is likely to grow, owing to the increase in the proportion of old buildings as a result of the downturn in the local property development market. The research results are likely to be of use to other common law countries where multi‐storey buildings are the major form of property for property investment.

Can one describe the ‘natural’ process of pregnancy as ‘harm’, even when negligently brought about? What does that harm consist of? Offering a contextual analysis of the English judiciary's characterisation of wrongful pregnancy, this paper demonstrates from a feminist perspective that the current construction of pregnancy as a ‘personal injury’ is deeply problematic. Forwarding an alternative account, this paper argues for law to embrace a richer notion of autonomy that will better resonate with women's diverse experiences of reproduction, and articulate the importance of autonomy in the reproductive domain: notably, women gaining control over their moral, relational and social lives.

Despite growing awareness of abuse of people with learning disabilities and prospective legal improvements, it is still uncommon for people with learning disabilities to obtain justice for experiences of abuse. It has been recognised that recent legislation pertaining to the Sexual Offences Act, as well as the Mental Health Act, has been little used and has not provided effective protection for people with learning disabilities, especially if abuse is perpetrated by another person with learning disabilities. This can leave the abused person feeling, among other things, disempowered and silenced, which can be compounded if they are believed by professionals and others and still no justice is evident. This paper is an account of supporting a man with learning disabilities, both therapeutically and legally, to obtain recognition of his experience of sexual abuse by using the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority (CICA) as an alternative to the criminal justice system.

This collection of original papers had its origin in a series of annual meetings of the National Association of Forensic Economics (NAFE) held in Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, and the United States from 2004 to 2008.¹ NAFE sponsored these meetings to explore common research areas in the calculation of damages in personal injury and death litigation in Western Europe and the United States. NAFE was founded in 1986 and is the largest association of economists and other damages experts specializing in the calculation of economic damages in litigation in the United States and Canada. The Journal of Forensic Economics (JFE) is the journal of NAFE and has been the primary outlet of peer-reviewed research in forensic economics over the past 22 years. The field of forensic economics has generated a substantial literature on methodologies and empirical research in the calculation of damages in personal injury, death, employment, and commercial litigation; and the use of that literature in the United States and Canadian courts by economists, Certified Public Accounts (CPAs), and actuaries has become commonplace in the past two decades (Thornton & Ward, 1999).²

Compensation for personal injury in Ireland is based on the principle that the wronged party should be restored to the position that he or she was in prior to the action of the other (restitution in integrum). Compensation must be in a single lump sum for both past and future loss, with no further redress even if losses subsequently arise that were unknown at the time of the trial.

This paper aims to highlight the challenges that case managers face in accessing appropriate statutory services and funding for young brain injured adults.

The paper uses aggregate case material, based on two years of case management with young adults with an acquired brain injury.

There is a need for separate, dedicated acquired brain injury services within local authority adult services. There should be a greater emphasis on assessments of functioning and decision‐specific mental capacity for clients with acquired brain injury rather than simplistic assumptions of capacity. Health and social welfare professionals in this field need a knowledge of the law related to benefits disregard and mental capacity, including recent case law. The statutory complaints system can provide redress where statutory services have been wrongly withheld.

Case managers need to keep up to date with the case law and application of health, social welfare and mental capacity legislation in order to ensure clients' rights and access to statutory services and funding.

This paper provides a subjective account, and analysis, of the reality of independent case managers working proactively, pragmatically and intensively across multidisciplinary and multiagency settings in the pursuit of clients' statutory rights.