Navigating Troubled Waters: Dealing with Personal Values When Representing Others

Legal academics have long struggled to define the appropriate role a lawyer\u27s moral judgment ought to play in client representation. In its simplest terms, the question is: Must a lawyer be a hired gun, seeking all lawful objectives sought by a client, or may a lawyer act independently to avoid the harm a client\u27s actions will cause innocent parties? Following disclosure of lawyer involvement in the Savings and Loan, Enron and WorldCom failures, many in society joined those scholars calling for greater moral responsibility. In this article, I provide an analytical approach consistent with existing law and practice that seeks to find a place for an individual lawyer\u27s moral principles. Lawyers, particularly new lawyers, need to know just how much discretion they will have to follow their consciences. Understanding the limits on one\u27s moral discretion will affect the way a lawyer practices and should influence her choice of practice environment. Prior to accepting a position, a lawyer should know whether she will be comfortable with the prevailing standards of practice

Book Review

Review of: MARC A. RODWIN, MEDICINE, MONEY & MORALS: PHYSICIANS\u27 CONFLICTS OF INTEREST. (Oxford University Press 1993). [430 pp.] Acknowledgements, acronyms, appendices, foreword, index, notes. LC: 92-49488; ISBN: 0-19-508096-3. [Cloth $25.00. 200 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016.

Review of Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan, by William H. Colby

[Excerpt] Bill Colby is the lawyer who represented the family of Nancy Cruzan in one of the nation’s most important “right to die” cases. Ms. Cruzan was a twenty-five year old woman who, due to a car accident, was deprived of oxygen for a significant time and cast into a persistent vegetative state. Colby’s book, Long Goodbye: The Deaths of Nancy Cruzan, is a nonfiction account of his journey with the Cruzan’s family over the course of almost seven years. Along the way, Attorney Colby, who was just five years out of law school when he agreed to represent the Cruzans, gave the first oral argument of his career in the Missouri Supreme Court and his second in the U.S. Supreme Court. He battled with a series of heavyweights, including Ken Starr (of Clinton impeachment fame), then Missouri Governor and now U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and William Webster. This book is anything but another self-absorbed story about a lawyer’s “big case.” It is a movingly written tale of a loving family faced with a tragedy, a clear and concise primer on complex “right to die” issues, and an inspirational tale about the way lawyers ought to relate to their clients

Long Term Prognosis after Acute Kidney Injury (AKI) - What is the Role of Baseline Kidney Function and Recovery? A Systematic Review

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Spontaneous PT symmetry breaking of a ferromagnetic superfluid in a gradient field

We consider the interaction of a ferromagnetic spinor Bose-Einstein condensate with a magnetic field gradient. The magnetic field gradient realizes a spin-position coupling that explicitly breaks time-reversal symmetry T and space parity P, but preserves the combined PT symmetry. We observe using numerical simulations, a first-order phase transition spontaneously breaking this re-maining symmetry. The transition to a low-gradient phase, in which gradient effects are frozen out by the ferromagnetic interaction, suggests the possibility of high-coherence magnetic sensors unaffected by gradient dephasing

Substrate complex competition – a regulatory motif that allows NFkB RelA to license but not amplify NFkB RelB

Signaling pathways often share molecular components, tying the activity of one pathway to the functioning of another. In the NFκB signaling system, distinct kinases mediate inflammatory and developmental signaling via RelA and RelB, respectively. Although the substrates of the developmental, so-called noncanonical, pathway are induced by inflammatory/canonical signaling, crosstalk is limited. Through dynamical systems modeling, we identified the underlying regulatory mechanism. We found that as the substrate of the noncanonical kinase NIK, the nfkb2 gene product p100, transitions from a monomer to a multimeric complex, it may compete with and inhibit p100 processing to the active p52. Although multimeric complexes of p100 (IκBδ) are known to inhibit preexisting RelA:p50 through sequestration, here we report that p100 complexes can inhibit the enzymatic formation of RelB:p52. We show that the dose–response systems properties of this complex substrate competition motif are poorly accounted for by standard Michaelis–Menten kinetics, but require more detailed mass action formulations. In sum, although tonic inflammatory signaling is required for adequate expression of the noncanonical pathway precursors, the substrate complex competition motif identified here can prevent amplification of the active RelB:p52 dimer in elevated inflammatory conditions to ensure reliable RelB-dependent developmental signaling independent of inflammatory context

Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one\u27s students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking? While the question of how to define and evaluate teaching necessarily bedevils deans and tenure committees who must make personnel decisions, the focus on defining the competent teacher has obscured from faculty attention the more fundamental question: how can we implement a system to improve faculty performance across the board? It is this question that law schools around the country have not adequately addressed. Three years ago, the faculty of Franklin Pierce Law Center adopted a program to improve our classroom teaching. This article describes and evaluates that program, in which all three authors played a role

Submission to the Commons Select Committee on Education

Computing is a rigorous, intellectually rich discipline alongside Maths, Science, or History. Like those subjects, Computing explores foundational principles and ideas, rather than training students in skills that date quickly. In an increasingly digital, knowledge-based age, Computing is fundamental both to full citizenship, and to our economic health as a nation. Yet, incredibly, Computing is virtually absent from UK schools. Instead, secondary schools in England currently teach ICT. The original concept behind ICT was to teach students how to use software to solve real-world problems. That would have been a tremendous achievement had it succeeded. However, what has actually happened in far too many schools is that ICT focuses solely upon IT literacy, and supporting teaching and learning in other curriculum contexts. ICT is not the discipline of understanding and knowledge of computers and the way they work.The creation of the EBac provides the perfect opportunity to send a clear signal to schools and pupils of the importance of Computing. Our key recommendation is that Computing (unlike ICT) should “count” towards the English Baccalaureate.On behalf of Computing at School:Dr. John WoollardProf. Simon Peyton-JonesDr. Bill Mitchel

Preliminary X-ray diffraction analysis of YqjH from Escherichia coli: a putative cytoplasmic ferri-siderophore reductase

YqjH is a cytoplasmic FAD-containing protein from Escherichia coli; based on homology to ViuB of Vibrio cholerae, it potentially acts as a ferri-siderophore reductase. This work describes its overexpression, purification, crystallization and structure solution at 3.0 A resolution. YqjH shares high sequence similarity with a number of known siderophore-interacting proteins and its structure was solved by molecular replacement using the siderophore-interacting protein from Shewanella putrefaciens as the search model. The YqjH structure resembles those of other members of the NAD(P)H:flavin oxidoreductase superfamily

A Philadelphia Story: Building Civic Capacity for School Reform in a Privatizing System

Following the 2001 state takeover of the School District of Philadelphia, a new governance structure was established and an ambitious set of reforms went into effect, generating renewed public confidence in the district. Despite this, maintaining reform momentum continues to be difficult in Philadelphia. This can be traced to on-going challenges to civic capacity around education. Defined by Stone et al (2001), civic capacity involves collaboration and mobilization of the city's civic and community sectors to pursue the collective good of educational improvement. Using interviews conducted with over 65 local civic actors and district administrators, and case studies of local organizations involved with education, the authors examine civic capacity in the context of Philadelphia. The authors find that while many individuals and organizations are actively involved with the schools, there are several factors that present unique challenges to the development of civic capacity in Philadelphia. Despite these challenges, the authors conclude that there are many reasons to be optimistic and offer several recommendations for generating civic capacity -- the kind that creates and sustains genuine educational change