The Slow-Down, An Unprotected Concerted Activity—A Pyrrhic Victory for Management

Federal labor legislation aims to reduce industrial strife, promote productive efficiency, and equalize bargaining power between employers and employees. To attain these interrelated objectives, the Taft-Hartley Act, like the Wagner Act, gives employees the right to engage in various forms of concerted activity free from management interference. Thus employees are free to join unions, to strike, to picket, and to bargain collectively. Not all concerted activities are protected, however. The Taft-Hartley Act expressly prohibits certain secondary boycotts, jurisdictional strikes, and strikes for recognition in defiance of a certified union. Even before the passage of that Act, courts had held that strikes in breach of a collective bargaining agreement and strikes to force an employer to violate a federal law were outside the protective ambit of the Wagner Act. Strikes have also been denied protection if they contravene a federal statute, such as that forbidding mutiny, or if they violate state laws prohibiting the seizure of property or acts of violence

The Brawner Rule—Why? or No More Nonsense on Non Sense in the Criminal Law, Please!

It ought not to be a matter of great scholarly interest to learn that yet another court has adopted as its formulation for the insanity defense the oft-embraced, oft-analyzed and oft-criticized text of the ALI Model Penal Code. It is not. It ought not to be a matter of more than momentary interest that in so doing that court abandoned its very own eighteen-year-old, oft-rejected, oft-analyzed and oft-criticized rule of Durham v. United States. It is not. It ought not to be worthy of more than slight interest that by retaining the definition of mental disease and defect which it adopted more than a decade ago in its reconstruction of Durham in McDonald v. United States, and by retaining the position it took later in Washington v. United States concerning the respective roles of the medical expert and the jury in determining criminal responsibility under Durham, the court in United States v. Brawner does no more than change the label and the apparent vintage year of its old and presumably discredited rule. It is not. The question becomes, why devote any time to the study of a decision in which a court, not unlike the Esso tiger announcing its change of name with the assurance of no change in stripes, announces, albeit with far more words, a change in name only for its insanity defense formulation. The answer is to be found in another question which is worth asking and worth trying to answer: Why does the court, except for Chief Judge Bazelon, who writes a separate but concurring dissent, fail to recognize how great is its contribution to the confusion and misunderstanding which hallmark the debate about the insanity defense? The answer is that the court neither asks nor answers: Why an insanity defense? What are its purposes

The Brawner Rule—Why? or No More Nonsense on Non Sense in the Criminal Law, Please!

This Article will focus primarily on two matters in the Brawner court\u27s opinion: 1) its decision not to abolish the insanity defense; and 2) its decision to permit the introduction of evidence concerning a defendant’s abnormal mental condition if relevant to establishing or negating the specific intent element of certain crimes

A Well-Hung Horse: Sired by Knowledge and Imagination

For more than a century, historians of science have been spinning a philosophical roulette wheel, pondering which is more important in the creative process: imagination or knowledge. The most original scientists (and artists) in our day discover newness by blending existing knowledge with imaginative thinking

Liver Transplantation to Provide Low-Density-Lipoprotein Receptors and Lower Plasma Cholesterol in a Child with Homozygous Familial Hypercholesterolemia

A six-year-old girl with severe hypercholesterolemia and atherosclerosis had two defective genes at the low-density-lipoprotein (LDL) receptor locus, as determined by biochemical studies of cultured fibroblasts. One gene, inherited from the mother, produced no LDL receptors; the other gene, inherited from the father, produced a receptor precursor that was not transported to the cell surface and was unable to bind LDL. The patient degraded intravenously administered 125I-LDL at an extremely low rate, indicating that her high plasma LDL-cholesterol level was caused by defective receptor-mediated removal of LDL from plasma. After transplantation of a liver and a heart from a normal donor, the patient's plasma LDL-cholesterol level declined by 81 per cent, from 988 to 184 mg per deciliter. The fractional catabolic rate for intravenously administered 125I-LDL, a measure of functional LDL receptors in vivo, increased by 2.5-fold. Thus, the transplanted liver, with its normal complement of LDL receptors, was able to remove LDL cholesterol from plasma at a nearly normal rate. We conclude that a genetically determined deficiency of LDL receptors can be largely reversed by liver transplantation. These data underscore the importance of hepatic LDL receptors in controlling the plasma level of LDL cholesterol in human beings. (N Engl J Med 1984; 311: 1658–64.). © 1984, Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved