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The Great Gatsby, set during the age of automobility, and centering on a fatal accident, is replete with unintentional and intentional torts, including negligence, battery, alienation of affections, false imprisonment, and negligent homicide. Yet tort law is not even mentioned, much less pursued, as an avenue for redress of the various harms done the victims of these torts. The chapter argues that tort law’s absence has to do less with Fitzgerald’s intentions than with the ineffectuality of tort law in the 1920s. For various reasons, the traditional and traditionally masculine idea of tort as a moral wrong requiring recompense, and of corrective justice requiring a legal system that would demand it, began to disappear by the end of Gatsby’s decade.

This chapter examines how Russians react after automobile accidents. It first describes the institutional infrastructure governing auto accidents before considering the aftermath of traffic accidents, with an eye to what it reveals about the country's legal culture. A comparison of water leaks and automobile accidents illustrates how people behave in the wake of such accidents. The chapter shows that Russians prefer to work out solutions on their own. They are skeptical of the capacity of formal legal institutions to provide help. It also discusses the ways in which Russians respond to auto accidents, such as seeking reconciliation, resorting to third-party intervention, employing avoidance strategy, negotiating privately, or initiating litigation to avoid having to go through the bureaucracy of their insurance companies.

This chapter argues that as the health care system increasingly confronts problems such as alcohol abuse and automobile accidents, the socialization function of medicine assumes greater importance and the medical role increasingly becomes one of defining a variety of social conditions as health problems. Social organization is linked to the hospitalization of the elderly. The role of medicine as legitimate labeler of problems has increased in stature based upon therapeutic successes in the past. There can be no doubt that social institutions profoundly affect the causes and levels of mortality and morbidity. There is also no doubt that in the twentieth century specific medical measures have been significant in decreasing some significant causes of morbidity and mortality, even in the face of little or no social change.

The fatality rate per 100 million vehicle miles among sixteen-year-old novice drivers is almost eight times higher than it is among the safest cohort of drivers, those with their driver's license for twenty years or more. Why do teen drivers have such a high accident rate and what can be done about it? Clearly, any serious attempt at remediation requires that one understands something about the types of behaviors that lead to crashes and what it is about driving that leads to such behaviors for the novice. There are many possible reasons why searching for potential risks might not be a trivial skill, and this chapter takes as its starting point multiple-resource theory. Perhaps problems occur for novice drivers that do not occur for more experienced drivers because experienced drivers can better divide their attention between the vehicle control task and the search and risk prediction tasks. There are other variants of what is known globally as the divided attention hypothesis.

Some kinds of problems appear to be more prevalent in emerging adulthood than in any subsequent adult life stage. This chapter first examines rates and sources of externalizing problems (including automobile accidents, crime, and substance abuse) and internalizing problems (including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders). Then the theory of emerging adulthood is applied to understanding why some of these problems are especially prevalent in this life stage, using the five features of emerging adulthood as a framework. Finally, trends in the past two decades are examined in rates of some externalizing problems, and possible reasons for those trends. Most trends are positive, especially in automobile accidents and crime, but certain kinds of substance use have increased.

This chapter discusses the privacy issues raised by the film 21 Grams (2003). The film explores the notion that human lives and fates are interconnected. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu uses contemporary automotive culture to move his characters into position, to show that they are connected and what they value. One of the consequences of car culture—the car crash—functions as plot hinge, forcing different lives into relationship with one another. While not initially situated within a medical environment, a car crash can be of bioethical significance because automobile accidents and other human tragedies may also produce commodities that Western society considers good: donated organs. The character Paul's receipt of a donor heart is interwoven with events dealing with the fallout from a breach of physician-patient privilege and breach of donor-recipient confidentiality.