Joint Judgment Research Articles

Truth, Justice and the Australian Way About 'Open Standing': Truth About Motorways Pty Ltd v Macquarie Infrastructure Investment Management Ltd

In 1998, the constitutionality of the 'open standing' provisions contained in the Trade Practices Act 1974 (Cth) was directly challenged in the High Court for the first time since their enactment. This issue came to a head in 1998, when a community group, Truth About Motorways (TAM), brought suit under the TPA against Macquarie Infrastructure Investment Management Ltd (MIIM). TAM was concerned about the publication and distribution of a prospectus produced by MIIM in order to attract investor for units in an investment trust proposing to invest in the construction and private ownership of a toll road in Sydney. TAM alleged that claims made in the prospectus about anticipated volumes of traffic on the road constituted misleading conduct within the meaning of section 52 of the TPA. Significantly, TAM neither claimed a special interest in the subject matter of the dispute nor that it had suffered any loss or damage on account of MIIM's conduct. It relied instead exclusively on the open standing provisions contained in sections 80 and 163A of the TPA. MIIM filed a defence pleading that TAM had no standing to maintain an action against it. MIIM argued that so far as §§ 80 and 163A of the TPA purported to confer standing on TAM they were constitutionally invalid. In March 2000, the Australian High Court considered MIIM's constitutional claim. The detail of MIIM's argument was succinctly summarized by Chief Justice Gleeson and Justice McHugh in a joint judgment.

Individual and Joint Expert Judgments as Reference Standards in Artifact Detection

ObjectiveTo investigate the agreement among clinical experts in their judgments of monitoring data with respect to artifacts, and to examine the effect of reference standards that consist of individual and joint expert judgments on the performance of artifact filters. DesignIndividual judgments of four physicians, a majority vote judgment, and a consensus judgment were obtained for 30 time series of three monitoring variables: mean arterial blood pressure (ABPm), central venous pressure (CVP), and heart rate (HR). The individual and joint judgments were used to tune three existing automated filtering methods and to evaluate the performance of the resulting filters. MeasurementsThe interrater agreement was calculated in terms of positive specific agreement (PSA). The performance of the artifact filters was quantified in terms of sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV). ResultsPSA values between 0.33 and 0.85 were observed among clinical experts in their selection of artifacts, with relatively high values for CVP data. Artifact filters developed using judgments of individual experts were found to moderately generalize to new time series and other experts; sensitivity values ranged from 0.40 to 0.60 for ABPm and HR filters (PPV: 0.57–0.84), and from 0.63 to 0.80 for CVP filters (PPV: 0.71–0.86). A higher performance value for the filters was found for the three variable types when joint judgments were used for tuning the filtering methods. ConclusionGiven the disagreement among experts in their individual judgment of monitoring data with respect to artifacts, the use of joint reference standards obtained from multiple experts is recommended for development of automatic artifact filters.

Are dual-phase 18F-FDG PET scans necessary in nasopharyngeal carcinoma to assess the primary tumour and loco-regional nodes?

This prospective study aimed to investigate the efficacy of dual-phase positron emission tomography (PET) in evaluating the loco-regional status of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). Eighty-four patients with newly diagnosed NPC and a fasting serum glucose level of <200 mg/dl were enrolled. [18F]fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (18F-FDG) PET studies (at 40 min and 3 h after injection of 370 MBq 18F-FDG) and head and neck magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) were performed within 1 week. Diagnostic criteria for NPC comprised the histopathological findings, the joint judgments of the research team and the post-treatment outcome. Each lesion's maximum standardised uptake value (SUV) and retention index were obtained. SUV data were evaluated using a paired t test. Receiver operating characteristic curves and calculation of the area under the curve (AUC) determined the discriminative power. 18F-FDG PET was significantly superior to MRI in identifying lower neck NPC nodal metastasis (AUC: 1 vs 0. 972, P=0.046) and overall loco-regional metastases (AUC: 0.985 vs 0.958, P=0.036). However, 18F-FDG PET was similar to MRI in detecting primary tumour, as well as retropharyngeal, upper neck and supraclavicular nodal metastases. There was no significant difference between early phase (40 min) and delayed phase (3 h) 18F-FDG PET in the detection of primary tumours (accuracy: 100% vs 100%) or loco-regional nodal metastasis (AUC: 0.984 vs 0.985, P=0.834). 18F-FDG PET is superior to MRI in identifying lower neck nodal metastasis of NPC. Additional 3-h 18F-FDG PET contributes no further information in the detection of primary tumours or loco-regional metastatic nodes in untreated NPC patients.

PROXIMITY AND THE STANDARD OF CARE — COOK v. COOK

In December 1986, the High Court decision in Cook v. Cook heralded a new development in the concept of proximity and its relevance in negligence actions in Australia. Not only did four of the five sitting judges hand down a joint judgment, thus formulating clearly the High Court interpretation and application of the general rule of proximity, begun by Deane J. in Jaensch v. Coffey, but the general rule has, it is submitted, been extended in its application. It is to the joint judgment that the attention of this note is directed, though it is noted that Brennan J. has, in three recent decisions involving various categories of negligence actions, given a separate judgment in which he confirms the view that '... I regard Lord Atkin's test of neighbourhood or proximity as satisfied by reasonable foreseeability of injury'.

TWO NOTES ON RECENT DEVELOPMENTS CONCERNING 'PROXIMITY' IN NEGLIGENCE ACTIONS: PROXIMITY AND NEGLIGENT ADVICE — THE SAN SEBASTIAN CASE

In November 1986, the High Court handed down its decision in San Sebastian Pty Ltd v. Minister Administering the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979. The importance of the decision is that four of the five Justices sitting delivered a joint judgment clarifying the approach to be taken in determining negligence actions for economic loss founded on misstatement. It confirms that the notion of proximity will be used as a determinant of the overall duty of care.

Some Situational Factors Improving Cognitive Conflict Reduction and Interpersonal Understanding

An important program of psychological laboratory research on cognitive conflict is based on Hammond's (1965) lens model. Most representative of this work is the triple-system case in which two persons conflict in their judgments on a mutual task of known structure and properties. Built into this case are two constraints reflecting characteristics of some conflict settings: task outcome feedback and the requirement that the conflicting parties reach a consensus. Minimal conflict reduction is evidenced in these experiments because the demands of outcome feedback orient the subjects to adapt to the changing policy dictated by the task rather than that defined by the other person. To examine the situational limits of these findings, a study was designed for a double-system case comprised of the two policy makers, but in which the structure and properties of the task are undetermined. Hence, no feedback was provided; moreover, joint judgments were made optional. Another deviation from the paradigm involved selecting subjects with already divergent belief systems rather than inducing discrepant policies through different training. Results clearly demonstrated considerable conflict reduction when persons with socially acquired opposing policies, which happened to be linear, were simply allowed free discussion and were not evaluated by task-accuracy feedback. Afterwards, subjects privately made another series of judgments as well as predictions of their partner's judgments. Overall, subjects sustained the substantial level of agreement achieved and revealed an even higher degree of assumed similarity. Limitation of the findings in view of the uniformly linear policies tested is emphasized.

Connotations and cognitive conflict: A comment on the Kuhlman, Miller and Gungor results

In a recent study, Kuhlman et al. (1973) investigated the effects of differences in connotations on cognitive conflict in an experiment following Hammond's (1965) “lens model” interpersonal conflict (IPC) paradigm. The conflict task was a political decisions task which required the subjects to infer the future level of democratic institutions in a country from two cues: (1) The amount of state control over the individual (2) and the extent to which government was determined by elections. The subjects rated the concepts of “state control” and “elections” on four evaluative scales of the semantic differential. From these ratings, connotatively different pairs and connotatively similar pairs were created. In addition, the degree of denotative differences was varied in the experiment. Denotatively different pairs were created by training one of the subjects in each pair to use only the state‐control cue and the other subject to use only the elections cue. Denotatively similar pairs were created by training the subjects in each pair to use the same cue.After the training, the subjects in each pair went through 20 conflict trials. On each of these trials, they were given a card depicting the level of state control and the level of elections for a country. The subjects (I) studied this card, (2) announced their individual judgments of the criterion, (3) discussed the case until they could reach a joint judgment, acceptable to both of them, after which (4) they were informed of the correct answer and went on to the next trial. For further details on the procedure, the reader is referred to the original paper by Kuhl‐man et al. (1973).

Joint Judgment as Conclusive of Right to Contribution in New York

Joint Judgment as Conclusive of Right to Contribution in New York

Tortfeasors: Under What Circumstances Subject to Joint Judgment

Tortfeasors: Under What Circumstances Subject to Joint Judgment

Joint Tortfeasors. Contribution. Joint Tortfeasor Who Has Secured Judgment for Contribution under New York Statute Permitted to Contest Codefendant's Appeal from Joint Judgment

Joint Tortfeasors. Contribution. Joint Tortfeasor Who Has Secured Judgment for Contribution under New York Statute Permitted to Contest Codefendant's Appeal from Joint Judgment

Release. Joint Judgment Debtors. Effect of Release of One with Reservation of Rights against Other

Release. Joint Judgment Debtors. Effect of Release of One with Reservation of Rights against Other