Wills and Cleary Respond

Sean Cleary and Jennifer Taback

We study some combinatorial properties of the word metric of Thompson’s group F in the standard two generator finite presentation. We explore connections between the tree pair diagram representing an element w of F , its normal form in the infinite presentation, its word length, and minimal length representatives of it. We estimate word length in terms of the number and type of carets in the tr...

Sean Cleary and Jennifer

We describe a family of elements in Thompson’s group F which present a challenge to finding canonical minimal length representatives for group elements, and which show that F is not combable by geodesics. These elements have the property that there are only two possible suffixes of long lengths for geodesic paths to these elements from the identity; one is of the form g and the other of the for...

Dispensing with Wills' Act Formalities for Substantively Valid Wills

Living wills and religious communities.

Advance directives and living wills.

The article focuses on the philosophical, ethical and juridical problems concerning Advance directives and Living Wills (underlining analogies and differences). The author makes a critical comparison between the theories supporting Living Wills (the liberal theory appealing to the principle of self-determination and the utilitarian theory on the "quality of life") and the reasons against them (...