Growin\u27 Up: An Assessment of Adult Self-Image in Clinical Law Students

A novice at any age will understandably lack the confidence that only experience can foster. Nevertheless, the thesis of this article is that the clinic student’s self-image inhibits his or her confidence in a different way...This paper will draw upon theories of psychological and moral development to explore the ingredients of being an adult and having an adult self-image. Part II describes various useful measures for determining the commencement of adulthood. Part III applies the criteria explained in Part II and asks, then attempts to answer, the question of whether the majority of clinic law students are adults. Part IV highlights the obstacles to achieving adulthood faced by contemporary law students both prior to and during law school. Part V discusses the importance of an adult self-image in becoming a professional and whether it is even more important in the legal profession. It argues that having a better understanding of where our students stand developmentally enhances our effectiveness. Part VI stresses that, at the very least, clinic teachers must be mindful that the psychological movement of our students into adulthood is an important event and is key to their performance as lawyers. In this final Part, I suggest ways in which we can support our students’ transition into adulthood

Your Lips Are Moving...but the Words Aren\u27t Clear: Dissecting the Presumption That Jurors Understand Instructions

This Article examines and questions the jurisprudence that turns a blind eye to evidence that the jury instruction presumption, the assumption that juries understand their instructions, is ill-founded. While the presumption applies in any jury trial, the Article emphasizes the particular injustice associated with is application in criminal cases. Evidentiary presumption bases upon anything less violates an accused’s right to due process of law. Therefore, it is particularly troubling that in criminal cases, the presumption regarding the efficacy of crucial jury instructions remain baseless

The Voice of Reason—Why Recent Judicial Interpretations of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act’s Restrictions on Habeas Corpus Are Wrong

By filing a petition for a federal writ of habeas corpus, a prisoner initiates a legal proceeding collateral to the direct appeals process. Federal statutes set forth the procedure and parameters of habeas corpus review. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) first signed into law by President Clinton in 1996, included significant cut-backs in the availability of federal writs of habeas corpus. This was by congressional design. Yet, despite the dire predictions, for most of the first decade of AEDPA’s reign, the door to habeas relief remained open. More recently, however, the Supreme Court reinterpreted a key portion of the statute. Pursuant to this new interpretation, habeas corpus relief could become virtually unattainable. During the Supreme Court’s 2011–2012 Term, the Court denied habeas corpus relief to petitioners who demonstrated significant deprivations of constitutional rights. At the root of recent obstacles to relief is the interpretation of a short, but key clause in AEDPA’s amendments to 28 U.S.C. § 2254(d)(1). Pursuant to the statute, a federal court may only grant a writ if a state court’s adjudication on the merits “was contrary to, or involved an unreasonable application of, clearly established Federal law, as determined by the Supreme Court of the United States.” This article discusses the reasons why the interpretation or standard that defines the “unreasonable application” clause has proven to be most critical to the availability of habeas corpus relief

Regions of High Out-Of-Hospital Cardiac Arrest Incidence and Low Bystander CPR Rates in Victoria, Australia

BACKGROUND: Out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) remains a major public health issue and research has shown that large regional variation in outcomes exists. Of the interventions associated with survival, the provision of bystander CPR is one of the most important modifiable factors. The aim of this study is to identify census areas with high incidence of OHCA and low rates of bystander CPR in Victoria, Australia. METHODS: We conducted an observational study using prospectively collected population-based OHCA data from the state of Victoria in Australia. Using ArcGIS (ArcMap 10.0), we linked the location of the arrest using the dispatch coordinates (longitude and latitude) to Victorian Local Government Areas (LGAs). We used Bayesian hierarchical models with random effects on each LGA to provide shrunken estimates of the rates of bystander CPR and the incidence rates. RESULTS: Over the study period there were 31,019 adult OHCA attended, of which 21,436 (69.1%) cases were of presumed cardiac etiology. Significant variation in the incidence of OHCA among LGAs was observed. There was a 3 fold difference in the incidence rate between the lowest and highest LGAs, ranging from 38.5 to 115.1 cases per 100,000 person-years. The overall rate of bystander CPR for bystander witnessed OHCAs was 62.4%, with the rate increasing from 56.4% in 2008-2010 to 68.6% in 2010-2013. There was a 25.1% absolute difference in bystander CPR rates between the highest and lowest LGAs. CONCLUSION: Significant regional variation in OHCA incidence and bystander CPR rates exists throughout Victoria. Regions with high incidence and low bystander CPR participation can be identified and would make suitable targets for interventions to improve CPR participation rates

Large scale multifactorial likelihood quantitative analysis of BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants: An ENIGMA resource to support clinical variant classification

The multifactorial likelihood analysis method has demonstrated utility for quantitative assessment of variant pathogenicity for multiple cancer syndrome genes. Independent data types currently incorporated in the model for assessing BRCA1 and BRCA2 variants include clinically calibrated prior probability of pathogenicity based on variant location and bioinformatic prediction of variant effect, co-segregation, family cancer history profile, co-occurrence with a pathogenic variant in the same gene, breast tumor pathology, and case-control information. Research and clinical data for multifactorial likelihood analysis were collated for 1,395 BRCA1/2 predominantly intronic and missense variants, enabling classification based on posterior probability of pathogenicity for 734 variants: 447 variants were classified as (likely) benign, and 94 as (likely) pathogenic; and 248 classifications were new or considerably altered relative to ClinVar submissions. Classifications were compared with information not yet included in the likelihood model, and evidence strengths aligned to those recommended for ACMG/AMP classification codes. Altered mRNA splicing or function relative to known nonpathogenic variant controls were moderately to strongly predictive of variant pathogenicity. Variant absence in population datasets provided supporting evidence for variant pathogenicity. These findings have direct relevance for BRCA1 and BRCA2 variant evaluation, and justify the need for gene-specific calibration of evidence types used for variant classification

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe