Law Commons^™

Killing, Letting Die, And The Case For Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism, Ken M. Levy

Journal Articles

For over a century now, American scholars (among others) have been debating the merits of “bad-samaritan” laws – laws punishing people for failing to attempt “easy rescues.” Unfortunately, the opponents of bad-samaritan laws have mostly prevailed. In the United States, the “no-duty-to-rescue” rule dominates. Only four states even have bad-samaritan laws, and these laws impose only the most minimal punishment – either sub-$500 fines or short-term imprisonment.

This Article argues that this situation needs to be remedied. Every state should criminalize bad samaritanism. For, first, criminalization is required by the supreme value that we place on protecting human life, a …

Joint Attention, Joint Action, And Participatory Sense Making, Shaun Gallagher

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Developmentally, joint attention is located at the intersection of a complex set of capacities that serve our cognitive, emotional and action-oriented relations with others. It forms a bridge between primary intersubjectivity and secondary intersubjectivity consists in a set of sensory-motor abilities that allow us to understand the meaning of another person's movements, gestures, facial expressions, eye direction, and intentional actions, in the context of face-to-face interactions. These are the abilities that we first require in order to enter into joint-attentional situations. Once we are in situations of joint attention we are then able to further enhance our understanding of others, …