Innovations and Experiments in Uses of Health Manpower—The Effect of Licensure Laws

Time-resolved optical spin orientation is employed to study spin dynamics of I * and I-1* excitons bound to isoelectronic centers in bulk ZnO. It is found that spin orientation at the exciton ground state can be generated using resonant excitation via a higher lying exciton state located at about 4 meV from the ground state. Based on the performed rate equation analysis of the measured spin dynamics, characteristic times of subsequent hole, electron, and direct exciton spin flips in the exciton ground state are determined as being tau(s)(h) = 0.4 ns, tau(s)(e) greater than= 15 ns, and tau(s)(eh) greater than= 15 ns, respectively. This relatively slow spin relaxation of the isoelectronic bound excitons is attributed to combined effects of (i) weak e-h exchange interaction, (ii) restriction of the exciton movement due to its binding at the isoelectronic center, and (iii) suppressed spin-orbit coupling for the tightly bound hole

Constitutional Law: Supreme Court Holds Pennsylvania Statute Imposing Costs on an Acquitted Defendant Void for Vagueness

In sustaining the defendant\u27s vagueness challenge, the Supreme Court rejected the State\u27s contention that since the statute was civil in character, it did not have to meet the due process standard of certainty required of criminal statutes. The Court\u27s language is susceptible of varying interpretations which, in turn, give rise to possibilities for novel applications of the void-for-vagueness doctrine

A National Tax Bar: An End to the Attorney-Accountant Tax Turf War

Although current case law is divided regarding when an accountant is practicing law, this Article will explore different approaches to this problem. Specifically, Part II of this Article explores which entities control the regulation of the legal profession. Next, Part III examines the impact of the state courts on the issue of unauthorized legal practice. Part IV touches on the related issue of privilege and the treatment of attorney-client privilege in the context of tax practice. Further, Part V considers whether tax practice should be considered the practice of law, and Part VI of this Article examines the legal profession\u27s obligation to regulate the practice of law. Finally, Part VII proposes new educational requirements and the establishment of a tax bar to assure the public of some minimum standard of education and competency in the area of taxation

Informal Action—Adjudication—Rule Making: Some Recent Developments in Federal Administrative Law

Direct energy consumption of ICT hardware is only “half the story.” In order to get the “whole story,” energy consumption during the entire life cycle has to be taken into account. This chapter is a first step toward a more comprehensive picture, showing the “grey energy” (i.e., the overall energy requirements) as well as the releases (into air, water, and soil) during the entire life cycle of exemplary ICT hardware devices by applying the life cycle assessment method. The examples calculated show that a focus on direct energy consumption alone fails to take account of relevant parts of the total energy consumption of ICT hardware as well as the relevance of the production phase. As a general tendency, the production phase is more and more important the smaller (and the more energy-efficient) the devices are. When in use, a tablet computer is much more energy-efficient than a desktop computer system with its various components, so its production phase has a much greater relative importance. Accordingly, the impacts due to data transfer when using Internet services are also increasingly relevant the smaller the end-user device is, reaching up to more than 90 % of the overall impact when using a tablet computer.QC 20140825</p

A Patent Reformist Supreme Court and Its Unearthed Precedent

How is it that the Supreme Court, a generalist court, is leading a project of innovation reform in our times while the court of appeals established to encourage innovation is having its precedent stricken down time and again? This decade the Supreme Court has issued far more patent law decisions than in any decade since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952. In doing so, the Supreme Court has overruled the Federal Circuit in roughly threequarters of the patent cases in which the Supreme Court has issued opinions. In most of these cases, the Supreme Court has established rules that favor accused infringers over patent holders, and the result has been an era of patent litigation reform far more impactful than anything Congress has achieved. Scholars have observed that the Supreme Court tends to overrule Federal Circuit decisions that (1) impose rigid legal rules as opposed to flexible standards; (2) adopt special rules for patent law cases rather than applying general principles of law and equity applicable to all federal cases; and/or (3) fail to grant sufficient discretion to the district courts. This paper examines the twenty-eight Supreme Court opinions overruling the Federal Circuit since 2000 and quantifies their rationales to discover that, while these reasons are often invoked, the Supreme Court’s most common rationale is that the Federal Circuit has disregarded or cabined its older precedent from before the 1982 creation of the Federal Circuit, from before the 1952 Patent Act, and even from before the 20th Century. The Court has relied on this rationale in twenty-one of the twenty-eight cases. The paper then seeks to probe beneath the surface level patterns to discover the deeper roots of the discord between the Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit. Constitutional law scholars have observed that the Supreme Court’s policy preferences are the primary, unstated motivation behind its decisions. The Court writes opinions that rely on the flexible tools of precedent and stare decisis in order to implement its policy choices while maintaining its institutional reputation for neutrality. The Court does this by influencing precedent vitality; the Court selects which of its precedent to rely upon and augment and which of its precedent to distinguish and narrow. This process runs in direct conflict with the Federal Circuit, a court that was originally conceived and viewed by some of its members as a court intended to bring uniformity to patent law in a way that would reinvigorate patent rights. The Federal Circuit would implement the 1952 Patent Act in a way that would draw patent law out of the nineteenth century. But for the Supreme Court, the 1952 Act was a mere codification of patent law as developed by the courts for over a hundred years. Hence, the Federal Circuit seeks to influence precedent vitality at direct cross-purposes with the Supreme Court. The result of the Supreme Court’s project has been a new era of common law patent reform in favor of accused infringers, which is gaining momentum as the Supreme Court decides far more patent cases than it has since the passage of the Patent Act of 1952

Secondary Sources: Top Ten

Secondary sources are a legal researcher\u27s best friend. They are a great place to begin researching a new topic as they provide a framework for understanding the subject. Not only will a good secondary source provide researchers with a way of approaching the topic, but it will also introduce beginning researchers to the language of the subject. Secondary sources also contain expert analysis, references to primary law such as cases, statutes, and regulations, and will also include such other resources as governmental reports, statistics, and other secondary sources. While secondary sources are an incredibly valuable research tool, they can offer such a wide array of options that researchers become overwhelmed with the sheer number of choices. This can strike anyone, even a fairly experienced researcher. Librarians, too, can become overwhelmed, especially when faced with teaching law students about the value of secondary sources and how to harness their power