LLT Lab: Vaccine/Injury Project

There are many objectives for the Lab’s Vaccine/Injury Project (“V/IP”), but the major ones include:

• First, to investigate the logical structure of the statutory rule system, case law and evidence-assessment patterns under the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (“VICP”) in the United States;
• Second, to use our logic investigation and state-of-the-art technology to create useful tools that can increase the efficiency of the VICP decision-making process;
• Third, to create methods for training legal decision-makers and legal practitioners, as well as researchers and students, in the use of logic skills; and
• Fourth, to demonstrate the feasibility of a scalable, team approach in applying the default-logic framework to legal decisions generally.

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Vern Walker submitted a paper and gave a presentation at the Second International Conference on Quantitative Aspects of Justice and Fairness, held on 25-26 February 2011 in Fiesole, near Florence, Italy. The presentation, entitled “Empirically Quantifying Evidence Assessment in Legal Decisions,” reported some baseline results for the Vaccine/Injury Project.

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The decision in Howard v. Secretary of Health and Human Services is an example of a Special Master favoring medical records over familial testimony when determining how events are temporally related.

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In Stewart v. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Special Master Millman grounds her reasoning and evidence assessment of Althen Prong 1 in part on a substantial amount of policy.

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In Stewart v. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Special Master devotes a substantial portion of the discussion not just to assessing the medical evidence that supports a finding on Althen Prong 2, but assessing the credibility of the medical experts themselves.

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This post contains a chronological list of the decisions in the study sample for the Vaccine/Injury Project. As the Lab posts logic models for particular cases, you can access them through this list.

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This video takes a quick tour of the logic diagram for the statutory rules involved in the Lab’s Vaccine/Injury Project (“V/IP”). We model the reasoning of the special masters who decide these cases, and study their reasoning from evidence to findings of fact. In this project, we focus on the “causation-in-fact” condition of the Off-Table Cases.

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Professor Walker discusses the logical nature of legal rules.

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Professor Walker illustrates graphic diagrams of rule trees.

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Diagrams of rule trees enable users to visualize the logic of a system of legal rules. The Lab creates software models that both display as rule tree diagrams and provide active templates for modeling the reasoning of individual legal decisions. We use this particular rule tree to model the compensation decisions included in our Vaccine/Injury Project (“V/IP”).

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{redacted}, Grace {redacted} v. Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Office of Special Masters, No. 04-{redacted}V
Redacted version submitted: November 30, 2006

• DTaP vaccine
• Encephalopathy or infantile spasms disorder
• Not entitled to compensation

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Bolander v. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,
Office of Special Masters, No. 04-81V
Filed: May 31, 2006

• Prevnar vaccine
• Aplastic anemia
• Entitled to compensation

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Cusati v. Secretary of Health and Human Services,
Office of Special Masters, No. 99-0492V
Filed: September 22, 2005

• MMR vaccine
• Intractable seizure disorder and death
• Entitled to compensation

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Stewart v. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services,
Office of Special Masters, No. 06-287V
Filed: March 19, 2007

• Hepatitis A vaccine
• Cerebellar ataxia
• Entitled to compensation

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