The four-year undergraduate LLB: Progress and pitfalls

In this paper, the historical and contextual factors that resulted in a change from a postgraduate LLB to an undergraduate LLB, as the single qualification for lawyers in South Africa in 1997 as part of a national transformation agenda, are reviewed. It is timely to consider whether the motivating reasons for introducing a four-year degree, to enhance representivity within the legal profession and to reduce the cost of obtaining a legal education, have been met. Systemic and structural features of post-apartheid South Africa, which reflect the legacy of unequal educational provision, a vast socio-economic divide, and a divided legal profession, continue to hamper attempts to redress past imbalances. A failing school system, ongoing poverty, and the underpreparedness of increasing numbers of students gaining access to higher education have produced data that reveals high university drop-out rates, particularly for African students, and distressingly low levels of student success at tertiary institutions. Dissatisfaction amongst stakeholders regarding the quality of law graduates has added to the current impasse as to how legal education can most effectively be improved. The establishment of a new Ministry of Higher Education and the undertaking of a research project on the effectiveness of the law curriculum by the Council on Higher Education both promise some possibility of flexibility and change in the future

Whatever It Takes: How and When Supervisor Bottom-Line Mentality Motivates Employee Contributions in the Workplace

Given that many organizations are competitive and finance centered, organizational leaders may lead with a primary focus on bottom-line attainment, such that they are perceived by their subordinates as having a bottom-line mentality (BLM) that entails pursuing bottom-line outcomes above all else. Yet, the field is limited in understanding why such a leadership approach affects employees’ positive and negative contributions in the workplace. Drawing on social exchange theory, we theorize that supervisors high in BLM can influence employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line, which in turn can influence employees’ task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We also examine employee ambition as a moderator of this process. Using three-wave, multisource data collected from the financial services industry, our results revealed that high-BLM supervisors elevate employee task performance as well as UPB by motivating employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line. Furthermore, we found that employee ambition served as a first-stage moderator, such that the mediated relationships were stronger when employee ambition was high as opposed to low. Our findings break away from the dominant dysfunctional view of BLM and provide a more balanced view of this mentality

Hydrodynamic approach to coherent nuclear spin transport

We develop a linear response formalism for nuclear spin diffusion in a dipolar coupled solid. The theory applies to the high-temperature, long-wavelength regime studied in the recent experiments of Boutis et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 137201 (2004)], which provided direct measurement of interspin energy diffusion in such a system. A systematic expansion of Kubo's formula in the flip-flop term of the Hamiltonian is used to calculate the diffusion coefficients. We show that this approach is equivalent to the method of Lowe and Gade [Phys. Rev. 156, 817 (1967)] and Kaplan [Phys. Rev. B 2, 4578 (1970)], but has several calculational and conceptual advantages. Although the lowest orders in this expansion agree with the experimental results for magnetization diffusion, this is not the case for energy diffusion. Possible reasons for this disparity are suggested.Comment: 7 pages, REVTeX4; Published Versio