Pro Bono in Law Schools: Tracking the effect of pro bono service in an Australian university law clinic

It has been widely acknowledged that pro bono service in law clinics and university access to justice initiatives have a positive impact on students, especially in relation to increasing their graduate employability skills. However, little empirical evidence exists in respect of the extended benefits of pro bono service during students’ studies in relation to the students themselves once they enter the workforce, as well as data on the perceived benefits by recipients of the pro bono services. This article explores the impact of pro bono service by university students in a university law clinic from two perspectives, namely that of the graduates themselves after they enter legal practice; and that of the community members who are clients of the pro bono clinics. In the context of a pilot project dealing with these two issues, the author investigates: first, the incidence of continuing pro bono service once law graduates enter legal practice, and the motivating factors for their ongoing involvement in pro bono (or lack thereof), by surveying a group of clinic alumni of a Commercial Law Clinic held at Bond University; and second, the perceived benefits reported by clients of the same law clinic over a period of approximately five years

Optical production and detection of dark matter candidates

The PVLAS collaboration is at present running, at the Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro of I.N.F.N., Padova, Italy, a very sensitive optical ellipsometer capable of measuring the small rotations or ellipticities which can be acquired by a linearly polarized laser beam propagating in vacuum through a transverse magnetic feld (vacuum magnetic birefringence). The apparatus will also be able to set new limits on mass and coupling constant of light scalar/pseudoscalar particles coupling to two photons by both producing and detecting the hypothetical particles. The axion, introduced to explain parity conservation in strong interactions, is an example of this class of particles, all of which are considered possible dark matter candidates. The PVLAS apparatus consists of a very high finesse (> 140000), 6.4 m long, Fabry-Perot cavity immersed in an intense dipolar magnetic field (~6.5 T). A linearly polarized laser beam is frequency locked to the cavity and analysed, using a heterodyne technique, for rotation and/or ellipticity acquired within the magnetic field.Comment: presented at "Frontier Detectors for Frontier Physics - 8th Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors - May 21-27, 2000" to appear in: Nucl.Instr. and Meth.