Harry Edward\u27s Nostalgia

Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers\u27 questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty years or so most legal academic effort went into texts that were of direct use to practicing lawyers. Law reviews were a common starting place for lawyers\u27 legal research, and lawyers and judges who subscribed to law reviews could expect to find useful articles that routinely touched on their areas of practice or that influenced their thinking. As Judge Harry Edwards recently complained,1 except for student notes, or an occasional symposium issue, that is no longer the case. Today\u27s journals are filled with a very different kind of scholarship, written by a different species of law professor and targeted at a different audience. Edwards is surely correct that most legal scholarship nowadays has little to offer to practicing lawyers, to judges, or to legislators.

Harry Edward\u27s Nostalgia

Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers\u27 questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty years or so most legal academic effort went into texts that were of direct use to practicing lawyers. Law reviews were a common starting place for lawyers\u27 legal research, and lawyers and judges who subscribed to law reviews could expect to find useful articles that routinely touched on their areas of practice or that influenced their thinking. As Judge Harry Edwards recently complained,1 except for student notes, or an occasional symposium issue, that is no longer the case. Today\u27s journals are filled with a very different kind of scholarship, written by a different species of law professor and targeted at a different audience. Edwards is surely correct that most legal scholarship nowadays has little to offer to practicing lawyers, to judges, or to legislators.

Essay: Recent Trends in American Legal Education

An American law professor in Japan has much more to learn than to teach. A foreigner like me - who comes to Japan on short notice, with no knowledge of Japanese culture and institutions, and with no Japanese language skills - sets himself a formidable task. Happily, the courtesy of my hosts, the patience of my colleagues, and the devotion of my students, have made for a delightful visit. I thank all of you. You asked me to talk about American legal education. As you surely know, the system of legal education in the U.S. is very different from the system of legal education in Japan. In this talk I will start with a little history. Then I will describe the present legal education system in some detail, to give you an overview of its structure, and of the core curriculum as it is taught at most law schools. Next I will discuss recent developments in legal education, to bring you up to date. I will end with some of the problems that face U.S. law schools, and in particular I will address a unique problem that confronts my own school, the University of Michigan Law School

First report of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in a systemic lupus erythematosus patient.

BackgroundTreatment of a multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) patient is clinically challenging, requiring a minimum of 18 months of therapy. Its occurrence in a systemic lupus erythromatosus (SLE) patient may complicate management of both MDR-TB and SLE. This is the first descriptive report of MDR-TB in an SLE patient.Case presentationA 19-year old female receiving long-term prednisolone for SLE was diagnosed with MDR-TB. She was started on MDR-TB treatment regimen and prednisolone was replaced with azathioprine. After an initial response to therapy, patient experienced a flare of lupus symptoms. Imaging studies revealed avascular necrosis of right femoral head. She was then treated with intravenous methyl-prednisolone, followed by maintenance corticosteroid. Azathioprine was discontinued due to hematological toxicity and failure to control SLE. Her symptoms of lupus regressed and did not re-occur for the duration of her MDR-TB treatment. Patient was declared cured of MDR-TB after 18 months of ATT. She is currently scheduled for a total hip replacement surgery.ConclusionsThis case highlights the challenges of simultaneously managing MDR-TB and SLE in a patient due to their over-lapping signs and symptoms, drug-drug interactions, and the need for use of immunomodulatory agents in the absence of standard guidelines and documented previous experiences. Our experience underscores the importance of appropriate selection of treatment regimens for both MDR-TB and SLE

Wrong Turn on the Ex Post Facto Clause

The Ex Post Facto Clause bars any increase in punishment after the commission of a crime. But deciding what constitutes an increase in punishment can be tricky. At the front end of a criminal case, where new or amended criminal laws might lengthen prisoners’ sentences if applied retroactively, courts have routinely struck down such changes under the Ex Post Facto Clause. At the back end, however, where new or amended parole laws or policies might lengthen prisoners’ sentences in exactly the same way if applied retroactively, courts have used a different standard and upheld the changes under the Ex Post Facto Clause. Because the harm is identical and lies at the core of what the Ex Post Facto Clause is supposed to protect against, we think the asymmetry is mistaken. Parole is an integral part of punishment: it determines how much time people will serve on their sentences. Until the twenty-first century, black-letter law forbade even modest parole changes that were adverse to prisoners. If a change in the parole regime might lead to longer sentences, then courts insisted that the change be applied prospectively only. Over the last two decades, relying on language in two US Supreme Court parole cases decided in 1995 and 2000, the lower courts have shifted parole ex post facto doctrine by 180 degrees. Prisoners can no longer prevail, even when the change in the state parole regime is almost certain to lead to significantly longer sentences. In the context of parole, the courts have repudiated past doctrine and strayed far from the purposes of the Ex Post Facto Clause. In this article, we review the history, show how the current case law is misguided and illogical, and put forward a new framework that would restore the Ex Post Facto Clause to its rightful place

Efficient Batch Verification for UP

Consider a setting in which a prover wants to convince a verifier of the correctness of k NP statements. For example, the prover wants to convince the verifier that k given integers N_1,...,N_k are all RSA moduli (i.e., products of equal length primes). Clearly this problem can be solved by simply having the prover send the k NP witnesses, but this involves a lot of communication. Can interaction help? In particular, is it possible to construct interactive proofs for this task whose communication grows sub-linearly with k? Our main result is such an interactive proof for verifying the correctness of any k UP statements (i.e., NP statements that have a unique witness). The proof-system uses only a constant number of rounds and the communication complexity is k^delta * poly(m), where delta>0 is an arbitrarily small constant, m is the length of a single witness, and the poly term refers to a fixed polynomial that only depends on the language and not on delta. The (honest) prover strategy can be implemented in polynomial-time given access to the k (unique) witnesses. Our proof leverages "interactive witness verification" (IWV), a new type of proof-system that may be of independent interest. An IWV is a proof-system in which the verifier needs to verify the correctness of an NP statement using: (i) a sublinear number of queries to an alleged NP witness, and (ii) a short interaction with a powerful but untrusted prover. In contrast to the setting of PCPs and Interactive PCPs, here the verifier only has access to the raw NP witness, rather than some encoding thereof

Logic regression-derived algorithms for syndromic management of vaginal infections.

BACKGROUND: Syndromic management of vaginal infections is known to have poor diagnostic accuracy. Logic regression is a machine-learning procedure which allows for the identification of combinations of variables to predict an outcome, such as the presence of a vaginal infection. METHODS: We used logic regression to develop predictive models for syndromic management of vaginal infection among symptomatic, reproductive-age women in south India. We assessed the positive predictive values, negative predictive values, sensitivities and specificities of the logic regression procedure and a standard WHO algorithm against laboratory-confirmed diagnoses of two conditions: metronidazole-sensitive vaginitis [bacterial vaginosis or trichomoniasis (BV/TV)], and vulvovaginal candidiasis (VVC). RESULTS: The logic regression procedure created algorithms which had a mean positive predictive value of 61 % and negative predictive value of 80 % for management of BV/TV, and a mean positive predictive value of 26 % and negative predictive value of 98 % for management of VVC. The results using the WHO algorithm were similarly mixed. CONCLUSIONS: The logic regression procedure identified the most predictive measures for management of vaginal infections from the candidate clinical and laboratory measures. However, the procedure provided further evidence as to the limits of syndromic management for vaginal infections using currently available clinical measures

Prevalence and Correlates of Primary Infertility in Mysore, India

Background & objectives: There are sparse data on the prevalence of primary infertility in India and almost none from Southern India. This study describes the correlates and prevalence of primary infertility among young women in Mysore, India. Methods: The baseline data were collected between November 2005 through March 2006, among 897 sexually active women, aged 15-30 yr, for a study investigating the relationship of bacterial vaginosis and acquisition of herpes simplex virus type-2 (HSV-2) infection. A secondary data analysis of the baseline data was undertaken. Primary infertility was defined as having been married for longer than two years, not using contraception and without a child. Logistic regression was used to examine factors associated with primary infertility. Results: The mean age of the women was 25.9 yr (range: 16-30 yr) and the prevalence of primary infertility was 12.6 per cent [95% Confidence Interval (CI): 10.5-15.0%]. The main factor associated with primary infertility was HSV-2 seropositivity (adjusted odds ratio: 3.41; CI: 1.86, 6.26). Interpretation & conclusions: The estimated prevalence of primary infertility among women in the study was within the range reported by the WHO and similar to other estimates from India. Further research is needed to examine the role of HSV-2 in primary infertility