The seeds of the American justice system were planted by our early English settlers. Major mutations from original British courts have sprouted and become manifest over the years. Only in America do we routinely try medical malpractice lawsuits before a jury of lay persons. In Britain, judges or magistrates decide the case --not because they are experts in medicine --but because they are experts in law, controlling the legal process as they attempt to dispense justice while drawing on testimony from a pool of medical experts selected and maintained by the court.British medical experts have no relationship to opposing counsel but may be interrogated by either of them. In the U.S. each side recruits its own experts and pays for their services. It is natural that the adversarial ensions transfer from lawyers to the experts from either side. But in both systems, ethical medical experts are essential and their purpose is to deliver an education -to a judge in Britain or to a judge and a jury on our side of the pond.Several of us may think our current system that has evolved to resolve malpractice allegations badly needs an overhaul. In fact -to employ a nontechnical descriptor favored by today's youth -it "sucks!" It resembles a huge vacuum cleaner operated by the plaintiffs' bar. We might wish for a better system -in short, tort reform--but as of January 2005, only 22 states have caps on noneconomic awards (a basic reform). Alissa Parady's article in the August AAO-HNS Bulletin reported that of 23 states in crisis, only Texas had achieved potentially effective reform by capping noneconomic awards at $250,000 with the passage of Proposition 12 in 2003. 1 There are some hopeful signs of reform from experiments being conducted, such as the University of Michigan's experience with prompt compensation for medical/ surgical errors and a campaign to improve patient safety and physician communication. They emphasize articulating reasonable expectations, answering all questions, responding to complaints, and helping patients process unanticipated outcomes. The design is to move from a culture of "deny and defend" to "compensate and communicate." The results so far are encouraging (the number of claims has been reduced

Previous research using flanker paradigms suggests that peripheral distracter faces are automatically processed when participants have to classify a single central familiar target face. These distracter interference effects disappear when the central task contains additional anonymous (non-target) faces that load the search for the face target, but not when the central task contains additional non-face stimuli, suggesting there are face-specific capacity limits in visual processing. Here we tested whether manipulating the format of non-target faces in the search task affected face-specific capacity limits. Experiment 1 replicated earlier findings that a distracter face is processed even in high load conditions when participants looked for a target name of a famous person among additional names (non-targets) in a central search array. Two further experiments show that when targets and non-targets were faces (instead of names), however, distracter interference was eliminated under high load-adding non-target faces to the search array exhausted processing capacity for peripheral faces. The novel finding was that replacing non-target faces with images that consisted of two horizontally misaligned face-parts reduced distracter processing. Similar results were found when the polarity of a non-target face image was reversed. These results indicate that face-specific capacity limits are not determined by the configural properties of face processing, but by face parts.

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