Hard Cases Research Articles

Does Interacting with Women Encourage Civic and Prosocial Attitudes? Evidence from Simulated Contact Experiments in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait

AbstractResearch suggests that interacting with women may encourage civic and prosocial attitudes, yet findings to date have been limited to democracies notable for their egalitarian norms. Using simulated contact experiments under controlled conditions, this article tests hypotheses for the first time in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguably “hard cases” given persistent norms of patriarchy and gender segregation. Yet, despite stronger contexts for male dominance, results suggest that interacting with women may indeed steer Saudi and Kuwaiti men toward more civic and other-regarding orientations, including aspects of tolerance, egalitarianism, openness, and community rule-following. These findings add much-needed comparative perspective to experimental research on mixed-gender dynamics and align with broader work highlighting the benefits of diverse interactions for groups and nations.

A Deletion Algorithm for the Marginal Problem in Propositional Logic Based on Boolean Arrays

This paper proposes a deletion algorithm for the marginal problem in propositional logic. The algorithm is based on the general Davis and Putnam deletion algorithm DP, expressed as a bucket elimination algorithm, representing sets of clauses with the same set of variables employing a Boolean array. The main contribution is the development of alternative procedures when deleting a variable which allow more efficient computations. In particular, it takes advantage of the case in which the variable to delete is determined by a subset of the rest of the variables. It also provides a set of useful results and tools for reasoning with Boolean tables. The algorithms are implemented using Python and the NumPy library. Experiments show that this procedure is feasible for intermediate problems and for difficult problems from hard Bayesian networks cases

Commentary: Impact of manual small-incision cataract surgery on outreach and training curriculum across the world.

Commentary: Impact of manual small-incision cataract surgery on outreach and training curriculum across the world.

Separating rank 3 graphs

We classify, up to some notoriously hard cases, the rank 3 graphs which fail to meet either the Delsarte or the Hoffman bound. As a consequence, we resolve the question of separation for the corresponding rank 3 primitive groups and give new examples of synchronising, but not QI, groups of affine type.

Circular (Yet Sound) Proofs in Propositional Logic

Proofs in propositional logic are typically presented as trees of derived formulas or, alternatively, as directed acyclic graphs of derived formulas. This distinction between tree-like vs. dag-like structure is particularly relevant when making quantitative considerations regarding, for example, proof size. Here we analyze a more general type of structural restriction for proofs in rule-based proof systems. In this definition, proofs are directed graphs of derived formulas in which cycles are allowed as long as every formula is derived at least as many times as it is required as a premise. We call such proofs “circular”. We show that, for all sets of standard inference rules with single or multiple conclusions, circular proofs are sound. We start the study of the proof complexity of circular proofs at Circular Resolution, the circular version of Resolution. We immediately see that Circular Resolution is stronger than dag-like Resolution since, as we show, the propositional encoding of the pigeonhole principle has circular Resolution proofs of polynomial size. Furthermore, for derivations of clauses from clauses, we show that Circular Resolution is, surprisingly, equivalent to Sherali-Adams, a proof system for reasoning through polynomial inequalities that has linear programming at its base. As corollaries we get: (1) polynomial-time (LP-based) algorithms that find Circular Resolution proofs of constant width, (2) examples that separate Circular from dag-like Resolution, such as the pigeonhole principle and its variants, and (3) exponentially hard cases for Circular Resolution. Contrary to the case of Circular Resolution, for Frege we show that circular proofs can be converted into tree-like proofs with at most polynomial overhead.

The Duty to Accept Apologies

Abstract The literature on reparative justice focuses for the most part on the grounds and limits of wrongdoers’ duties to their victims. An interesting but relatively neglected question is that of what – if anything – victims owe to wrongdoers. In this paper, I argue that victims are under a duty to accept wrongdoers’ apologies. I claim that to accept an apology is to form the belief that the wrongdoer’s apologetic utterance or gesture has the requisite verdictive, commissive and expressive dimensions; to communicate as much to him; and to recognise that his apology changes one’s normative status in relation to him, and to comport oneself accordingly. I then offer a Kantian argument for the duty to accept and qualify that argument in the light of some hard cases. I end the paper by addressing the objection that victims do not owe it to wrongdoers to engage in any form of reparative encounter.

Roe is Dead, Long Live the Courts: The Role of Courts in a Post-Roe America

Roe v. Wade was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. The pro-choice movement, like the pro-life movement after Roe, has suffered a major legal loss after Dobbs and should learn from the pro-life movement’s incrementalist legal strategies to slowly rebuild a constitutional right to abortion. Post-Dobbs, the pro-choice movement should pursue state constitutional level to create state constitutional rights to abortion. However, the pro-choice movement should also pursue incrementalist federal constitutional litigation in “hard cases,” cases where women with life-threatening pregnancy complications are denied abortion care, to rebuild a federal constitutional right to an abortion. While a federal constitutional case for a right to an abortion may not initially translate into legal victories, such arguments can increase public support for the pro-choice movement by reframing abortion as health care and transforming public perceptions of the women who seek abortions.

Enabling activist resilience: Bystander protection during protest crackdowns in Myanmar

AbstractWhat accounts for the survival and long‐term participation of activists in contentious movements under repression? I argue for the role of an important yet oft‐neglected factor: protective support by civilian bystanders. I propose that, mainly motivated by victim‐oriented sympathy, bystanders engage in high‐risk protection that helps activists to escape crackdowns and bolsters their dedication to the movement. To test my theoretical claims, I examine hard cases for activist survival at the height of state violence during military rule in Myanmar between 1988 and 2010, with an original qualitative data set consisting of oral history interviews and written accounts by more than 100 protest observers and former pro‐democracy activists. The data set presents an unprecedented number of voices from the average, non‐contentious general public, which are mostly missing in existing research on social movements. This approach generates a fresh perspective to better understand opportunities and constraints around movement entrepreneurs in hostile environments.

A Comprehensive Study on the Evaluation of Silhouette-Based Gait Recognition

Recently the methods based on silhouettes achieve significant improvement for gait recognition. The performance, e.g., 96.4% on the largest OUMVLP, indicates that a promising gait system is around the corner. However, we argue that the observation is not true. Firstly, we find that there exists a non-negligible gap of gait evaluation between academic research and practical applications. To validate the assumption, we conduct a comprehensive study on the evaluation for silhouette-based gait recognition and provide new insights into the limitations of the current methods. Our key findings include: (a) The current evaluation protocol is excessively simplified and ignores a lot of hard cases. (b) The current methods are sensitive to the noise caused by rotation and occlusion. Secondly, we observe that the data scarcity largely hinders the development of gait recognition and some crucial covariates (e.g., camera heights) are not thoroughly investigated. To address the issue, we propose a new dataset called Multi-Height Gait (MHG). It collects 200 subjects of normal walking, walking with bags and walking in different clothes. Particularly, it collects the sequences recorded by the cameras at different heights. We hope this work would inspire more advanced research for gait recognition. The project page is available at https://hshustc.github.io/TBIOM-Metric-Gait/.

The Thinking Paradigm of Judicial Proof

With the complexity of social relations, the traditional formal logical thinking cannot solve the hard cases. Inference to the best explanation, a formal logical model of evidential reasoning with proof standards, is applied to this task. The model instructs us to infer from the available evidence to the hypothesis, if the hypothesis correct, which can best explain that evidence. More narrowly, a number of plausible alternative explanations for evidence being observed at trial are generated. Then it enables legal decision-makers to evaluate evidential reasoning by comparing stories on either side of a case, selecting one as the best explanation of the evidence among them. This is a process of elimination. It happily combines falsification, inference and explanation. While traditional logical reasoning is a process of confirmation. Inference to the best explanation has been introduced to law by many scholars, so as to make up for the shortcomings of the logical thinking method. While the article concerns how to apply it in criminal case facts.

The devil is in the details: a small-lesion sensitive weakly supervised learning framework for prostate cancer detection and grading.

Prostate cancer (PCa) is a significant health concern in aging males, and the diagnosis depends primarily on histopathological assessments to determine tumor size and Gleason score. This process is highly time-consuming, subjective, and relies on the extensive experience of the pathologists. Deep learning based artificial intelligence shows an ability to match pathologists on many prostate cancer diagnostic scenarios. However, it is easy to make mistakes on some hard cases with small tumor areas considering the extensively high-resolution of whole slide images (WSIs). The absence of fine-grained and large-scale annotations of such small tumor lesions makes this problem more challenging. Existing methods usually perform uniform cropping of the foreground of WSI and then use convolutional neural networks as the backbone network to predict the classification results. However, cropping can damage the structure of tiny tumors, which affects classification accuracy. To solve this problem, we propose an Intensive-Sampling Multiple Instance Learning Framework (ISMIL), which focuses on tumor regions and improves the recognition of small tumor regions by intensively sampling the crucial regions. Experiments of prostate cancer detection show that our method achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.987 on the PANDA sets, which improves recall by at least 33% with higher specificity over the current primary methods for hard cases. The ISMIL also demonstrates comparable abilities to human experts on the prostate cancer grading task. Moreover, ISMIL has shown good robustness in independent cohorts, which makes it a potential tool to improve the diagnostic efficiency of pathologists.

Legal Obligation, Criminal Wrongdoing, and Necessity

AbstractIndividuals sometimes do things that they know will violate the terms of a statute. Most scholars deny that such actions are always morally wrong, but a coherent theoretical account of the relationships between 1) moral obligation, 2) legal obligation, and 3) criminal wrongdoing that can robustly classify hard cases has been elusive. This article starts with a Kantian account of the relationship between law and morality, and it proposes two closely related standards: one for legal obligation, and another for criminal wrongdoing. It then tests the plausibility and resilience of these standards by using them to generate illuminating new analyses of classic hypothetical cases involving alleged crimes committed under circumstances of necessity. These analyses offer reason to believe that the standards proposed in this article can anchor a Kantian theory of criminal responsibility that is simultaneously rigorous and humane.

Physical Philosophy: Martial Arts as Embodied Wisdom

While defining martial arts is not prerequisite to philosophizing about them, such a definition is desirable, helping us resolve disputes about the status of hard cases. At one extreme, Martínková and Parry argue that martial arts are distinguished from both close combat (as unsystematic) and combat sports (as competitive), and from warrior arts (as lethal) and martial paths (as spiritual). At the other extreme, mixed martial arts pundits and Bruce Lee speak of combat sports generally as martial arts. I argue that the fine-grained taxonomy proposed by Martínková and Parry can be usefully supplemented by a broader definition, specifically the following: martial arts are systematic fighting styles and practices as ways of embodying wisdom. A possible difficulty here is that such views face the charge of overemphasizing the “philosophical” aspect of martial arts. My definition can, however, avoid this apparent problem. If martial arts essentially aim to embody wisdom, this applies no less to the (strategic) practical wisdom of The Art of War than to the (ethical) practical wisdom of the Tao Te Ching. In an extended sense, then, any systematic fighting style, including combat sports, may count as a martial art insofar as it embodies wisdom by improving practical fighting skills.

Indétermination et hard cases : est-il méthodologiquement plausible de superposer discrétion linguistique et discrétion judiciaire ?

Lorsqu’on explore méthodologiquement la construction de la décision judiciaire et son contexte de réalisation-performance institutionnellement spécifique, on reconnaît un contraste saisissant entre, d’un côté, la complexité associée aux représentations du texte – déclenchée par l’érosion-dépassement du paradigme normativiste du XIXe siècle (et de sa théorie de l’interprétation), mais aussi par les contributions de la sémiotique juridique et les changements de perspective associés aux diverses linguistic, literary et aesthetic turns – et, de l’autre côté, le traitement du problème de l’indétermination, associé de manière dominante au problème des hard cases et de la création discrétionnaire ou cultivant un modèle synchronique d’autonomie-isolement (d’autosubsistance) des matériaux juridiques en vigueur. Cet article pose la question de savoir si cette association est nécessaire et productive et si, pour comprendre les implications méthodologiques de l’indétermination, ne gagnerait-on pas significativement à renoncer à cette affinité (à cette parentalité complexe) entre discrétion linguistique et discrétion juridique.

Making Law Possible

Making Law Possible

Healthcare Decision Making for Children in Singapore: The Missing Chapter in Comparison with English Law

Abstract In medical practice, Singaporean paediatricians regularly encounter ethical dilemmas concerning the medical treatment of children and adolescents. While such disputes tend to be resolved out of court, it is useful to understand the legal framework for decision making in hard cases. Unlike in England and Wales where there is an abundance of litigation in this area and the law is well established, Singapore has a dearth of case law and a few discrete statutes regarding consent to medical treatment by children. Local legal resources on this subject are limited, and the differences between Singaporean and English law are not always made clear in medical guidance. Therefore, this article provides a comparative roadmap and seeks to answer key questions in Singaporean law on healthcare decision making for children, such as: Who can make decisions on their behalf? When can children give or refuse consent to treatment on their own? What is the threshold for judicial intervention in disputes concerning children’s medical care? How should ‘best interests’ be determined? This article identifies gaps and proposes ways that Singaporean law can develop by drawing inspiration from English judgments while making adaptations to the local context. It outlines situations when it is appropriate for the courts to decide cases concerning children’s medical treatment, notwithstanding the preference for alternative dispute resolution in Singapore.

Enhancing Offensive Language Detection with Data Augmentation and Knowledge Distillation.

Offensive language detection has received important attention and plays a crucial role in promoting healthy communication on social platforms, as well as promoting the safe deployment of large language models. Training data is the basis for developing detectors; however, the available offense-related dataset in Chinese is severely limited in terms of data scale and coverage when compared to English resources. This significantly affects the accuracy of Chinese offensive language detectors in practical applications, especially when dealing with hard cases or out-of-domain samples. To alleviate the limitations posed by available datasets, we introduce AugCOLD (Augmented Chinese Offensive Language Dataset), a large-scale unsupervised dataset containing 1 million samples gathered by data crawling and model generation. Furthermore, we employ a multiteacher distillation framework to enhance detection performance with unsupervised data. That is, we build multiple teachers with publicly accessible datasets and use them to assign soft labels to AugCOLD. The soft labels serve as a bridge for knowledge to be distilled from both AugCOLD and multiteacher to the student network, i.e., the final offensive detector. We conduct experiments on multiple public test sets and our well-designed hard tests, demonstrating that our proposal can effectively improve the generalization and robustness of the offensive language detector.

Hartʼs judicial discretion revisited

The Harvard Law Review recently, for the first time, published Hart’s essay titled “Discretion”. It is a carefully arranged version of the lecture which he gave at Harvard in 1956. This essay fills significant gap in Hart's work concerning judicial reasoning. In my paper attention is devoted to his conception of judicial discretion, its two main types (express and tacit), and his understanding of interpretation and rationality related to Hartian discretion. According to Hart, discretion is a form of decision-making in hard cases, which is rational and to some extent constrained by law. However, because no combination of legal rules and principles, properly interpreted, will always give only one legally right answer, the judge in some cases must resort to non-legal reasons, i.e. exercise discretion. Hart’s insight that the law is not the sole ground for (judicial) decisions suggests that there is something “out there” (in our “practical universe”) that plays a role in the legal “earthly” world, and consequently, in the judicial world as well.

Anatomy of web data scraping: ethics, standards, and the troubles of the law

The paper examines the ethical and legal issues raised by web scraping technology. Attention is drawn to some landmark rulings to emphasize that jurisdictions such as the US and the EU Member States tackle issues of scraping from different perspectives. Although most litigation involves IP law, in particular copyright and the rights of database producers, scraping can also raise problems of data protection, unfair competition, and public or criminal law. Besides, many of such issues may fall into the gaps of the legal system. Accordingly, the paper aims to provide an overall framework for the ethical and legal issues of scraping, to take sides between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ uses of technology and, on this basis, flesh out the legal hard cases of the field.

Creating Rights, Terminating Rights, Overcoming Legal Conflicts

At the heart of this paper are judges and their obligations to ensure that conflicts over fragmented rights are cured, that fundamental rights are stewarded, and that justice prevails. There are several respected legal theories that have never been examined together before, but when three of them are placed in a nexus of constitutional law, we find that these ideas support broad powers for courts to control the distribution and allocation of rights, enabling the resolution of conflicts at many social levels. First, a succession of scholars has identified the risks of ‘fragmenting rights’, of allocating overlapping rights to too many parties. The danger presented is that those rights-holders may lose the use of their legal rights or privileges; this outcome is known as the ‘Tragedy of the Anticommons’. Too many rights held by too many parties, a ‘fragmentation of rights’, can lead to a lack of access to rights and a lack of access to justice. Second, the legal theories of Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase, who found that initial allocations of rights across a community might have been allocated in a manner that frustrates negotiations and other means to avoid conflicts; but judges have an opportunity and an obligation to reset those allocations of rights to better enable society toflourish. Third, Yale constitutional scholar Robert Cover wrote that judges can and should terminate claims of overlapping rights so that the litigious parties, and society at large, can return to a more harmonious co-existence. Cover wrote that this methodology of ‘jurispathic’ judges was both an ethical and a robust means of solving Dworkin’s ‘hard cases’. This paper investigates the nexus of these three jurisprudences and what the impact of their nexus is for constitutional scholars. This paper delivers original theoretical legal findings and provides functional approaches to best enable the resolution of conflicts before courts and the maintenance of rights and privileges for all parties. This paper documents an argument that courts, especially constitutional courts, have more power to solve social conflicts and other conflicts arising from legal rules and culturesthan many constitutional law scholars may have previously assumed feasible.