Principled Discretion: Concealment, Conscience, and Chancellors,

The problem of judicial discretion in our federal courts is perennial and vexing. Appointed by the President and tenured for life, federal judges are an anomaly in a democratic system such as ours. Their license to choose among rules of law and select precedents for their holdings may be restrained by craft rules, the opinion of peers, and the constraints of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, but the same Rules allow the judge great latitude in managing the conduct of pre-trial and trial proceedings. Indeed, the modem federal judge has much of the discretion of the old English chancellor, who determined facts without juries, allowed parties the freedom to amend their pleas and introduce all sorts of evidence in the name of justice, and was capable of creating new remedies when required by novel circumstances. If there was no check upon such chancellor\u27s discretion then, what guarantee have we now that judges will act responsibly toward the parties who submit their quarrels to the court and to the larger community whose members they serve? History does not teach definitive lessons, but it does offer precedents on the problem of discretion. Two of our young nation\u27s preeminent jurists, James Kent of New York and Joseph Story of Massachusetts, were sitting chancellors and wrote treatises on equity. They admitted that the discretion of chancellors was much controverted in their day, and in a marvelously subtle exchange, they wrestled with the source of the chancellor\u27s authority to impose justice upon litigants. In their treatment of what appears at first glance to be a very small point-the concealment of material conditions of goods sold by one party to anotherthey demonstrated that chancellors must simultaneously empower and restrain their discretion by basing it upon conscience, a conscience informed by an explicit theory of moral knowledge. The means that they used, therefore, were rooted not in law (for they acted in the interstices of law; if they merely followed the law, then every valid contract in law would be enforceable in equity), or in equity itself (since, in many areas of contract in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were making the rules, not following them, as they themselves admitted), but in their appreciation of shared dicta of moral philosophy. Implicit in their view of discretion is the claim that chancellors can see behind the facade of formal pleading to gauge the moral intentions of the parties to a transaction, and that it is right and fitting to impose contemporary moral standards upon that transaction

Klaus Mann\u27s Mephisto: A Secret Rivalry

Critics of the 1960s and 1970s have focused their attention on Klaus Mann\u27s use of his former brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens, as the model for the hero of his controversial novel, Mephisto, while more recent critics have emphasized its significance as a work of anti-Fascist literature. This essay seeks to resolve some of the apparent contradictions in Klaus Mann\u27s motivation for writing Mephisto by viewing the novel primarily in the context of his life and career. Although Mephisto is the only political satire that Klaus Mann wrote, it is consistent with his life-long tendency to use autobiographical material as the basis for much of his plot and characterization. Mann transformed his ambivalent feelings about Gründgens, which long antedated the writing of Mephisto, into a unique work of fiction which simultaneously expresses his indignation over the moral bankruptcy of the Third Reich and reveals his envy of Gründgens\u27s career successes

Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis

The tension between strict legalism and practical politics was perfectly illustrated in the treatment of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Cynthia Nicoletti holds both the J.D. and the Ph. D. and the present work demonstrates her facility in both law and political history. She rightly treats the prosecution of Davis as a story rather than a legal treatise, bringing alive the people and the problems on both sides of the case. Davis’s trial was supposed to be the test case of the legality of secession, but he was never actually tried

Growing Pennsylvania's High-Tech Economy: Choosing Effective Investments

Compares Pennsylvania's high-tech economic development incentives, programs, and taxes with those of six competitor states. Includes case studies, program summaries, and analyses using a proprietary model and database. Makes policy recommendations

CLASH-X: A Comparison of Lensing and X-ray Techniques for Measuring the Mass Profiles of Galaxy Clusters

We present profiles of temperature (Tx), gas mass, and hydrostatic mass estimated from new and archival X-ray observations of CLASH clusters. We compare measurements derived from XMM and Chandra observations with one another and compare both to gravitational lensing mass profiles derived with CLASH HST and ground-based lensing data. Radial profiles of Chandra and XMM electron density and enclosed gas mass are nearly identical, indicating that differences in hydrostatic masses inferred from X-ray observations arise from differences in Tx measurements. Encouragingly, cluster Txs are consistent with one another at ~100-200 kpc radii but XMM Tx systematically decline relative to Chandra Tx at larger radii. The angular dependence of the discrepancy suggests additional investigation on systematics such as the XMM point spread function correction, vignetting and off-axis responses. We present the CLASH-X mass-profile comparisons in the form of cosmology-independent and redshift-independent circular-velocity profiles. Ratios of Chandra HSE mass profiles to CLASH lensing profiles show no obvious radial dependence in the 0.3-0.8 Mpc range. However, the mean mass biases inferred from the WL and SaWLens data are different. e.g., the weighted-mean value at 0.5 Mpc is = 0.12 for the WL comparison and = -0.11 for the SaWLens comparison. The ratios of XMM HSE mass profiles to CLASH lensing profiles show a pronounced radial dependence in the 0.3-1.0 Mpc range, with a weighted mean mass bias of value rising to ~0.3 at ~1 Mpc for the WL comparison and of 0.25 for SaWLens comparison. The enclosed gas mass profiles from both Chandra and XMM rise to a value 1/8 times the total-mass profiles inferred from lensing at 0.5 Mpc and remain constant outside of that radius, suggesting that [8xMgas] profiles may be an excellent proxy for total-mass profiles at >0.5 Mpc in massive galaxy clusters.Comment: Accepted to ApJ; 24 pages; scheduled to appear in the Oct 10, 2014 issue. This version corrects the typographical error in the superscripts for Equation (2) to include the square of (r/r_core). The correct version of this equation was used in the analysi

Multidisciplinary approach to diagnosis and management of osteosarcoma – a review of the St Vincent's Hospital experience

BACKGROUND: Osteosarcoma is the most common primary malignant bone tumour in children and young adults. Despite advances in the diagnosis and management of osteosarcoma, there have been few recent studies describing the experiences of tertiary referral centres. This paper aims to describe and discuss the clinical features, pre-operative work-up, management and outcomes of these patients at St Vincent's Hospital (Melbourne, Australia). METHODS: Retrospective study of fifty-nine consecutive patients managed for osteosarcoma at St Vincent's Hospital between 1995 and 2005. RESULTS: Median age at diagnosis was 21 (range, 11–84) years. Gender distribution was similar, with thirty-one male and twenty-eight female patients. Twenty-five patients had osteosarcoma in the femur, eleven each were located in the humerus and tibia, six were identified in the pelvis, and one each in the clavicle, maxilla, fibula, sacrum, ulna and radius. Pre-operative tissue diagnosis of osteosarcoma was obtained through computed tomography-guided percutaneous biopsy in over ninety percent of patients. Following initial therapy, over fifty percent of patients remained relapse-free during the follow-up period, with twelve percent and twenty-seven percent of patients documented as having local and distant disease recurrence, respectively. Of patients with recurrent disease, sixty-two percent remained disease-free following subsequent surgical intervention (most commonly, pulmonary metastatectomy). CONCLUSION: Patient outcomes can be optimised through a multidisciplinary approach in a tertiary referral centre. At St Vincent's Hospital, survival and relapse rates of patients managed for osteosarcoma compare favourably with the published literature

Out of Pocket Expenses in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Background: Despite anecdotal evidence that the out of pocket costs of OCD can be substantial in some cases, there is no evidence on how many people they affect, or the magnitude of these costs. Aims: This paper explores the type and quantity of out of pocket expenses reported by a large sample of adults with OCD. Methods: Data on out of pocket expenses were collected from participants taking part in the OCTET multi-centre randomised controlled trial. Participants were aged 18+, meeting DSM-IV criteria for OCD, and scoring 16+ on the Yale Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale. Individual-level resource use data including a description and estimated cost of out of pocket expenses were measured using an adapted version of the Adult Service Use Schedule (AD-SUS): a questionnaire used to collect data on resource use. Results: Forty-five percent (208/465) reported out of pocket expenses due to their OCD. The mean cost of out of pocket expenses was £19.19 per week (SD £27.56 SD), range £0.06–£224.00. Conclusions: Future economic evaluations involving participants with OCD should include out of pocket expenses, but careful consideration of alternative approaches to the collection and costing of this data is needed

Results of Treatment for Patients With Multicentric or Bilaterally Predisposed Unilateral Wilms Tumor (AREN0534): A report from the Children’s Oncology Group

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156248/2/cncr32958_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156248/1/cncr32958.pd