The principles of Ubuntu: Using the legal clinical model to train agents of social change

For the past few decades, the legal clinical model has been used as a tool to teach law students the art of practising law. Typically, this model focuses on providing law students with an opportunity to work with clients and to handle legal cases in a safe environment, and often in slow motion. Although the legal clinical model has a number of advantages in assisting students to safely transition from law students to lawyers, it falls short in stressing the importance of using the law as a tool to achieve social justice within our society. The purpose of this paper is to propose that the legal clinical model be revamped to train law students to become not just lawyers, but agents of social change. Although we hope this article will be of relevance to a broad international audience, the critique focuses mainly on legal education in the United States

Social work and the penal state

The Criminal Justice System (CJS) has historically been a key site of social work intervention. Wacquant (2008, 2009a and 2009b) argues that the growth of social insecurity and the expansion of the penal state are endogenous features of the neo-liberal political project. The key premises of neo-liberalism have been accepted by parties of both the left and the right. Wacquant identifies that the “doxa” of the penal state such as “prison works” “zero tolerance” and “broken windows” have been widely accepted in an uncritical fashion. This shift alongside an increase in inequality had led to increasing social anxiety and mistrust. One manifestation of these trends is the “decline of the rehabilitative ideal” (Garland, 2001). Offenders, who were once generally viewed as marginalised individuals in need of social and welfare support are now regarded as sites of risk. The USA has led a penal arms race, in which, the use of imprisonment has grown significantly. In Europe, England and Wales has followed this trend most closely. Whilst acknowledging that penal policy is the result of a complex inter-relationship between social, cultural and historical factors, there are lessons to be learnt from the US experience. These include the impact of race and class inequalities as manifest in the CJS. The act of imprisonment is arguably an act of state violence and alongside the impact on individuals, communities and families, it has huge symbolic significance and value. The expansion of the penal state: the increasing numbers, poor conditions and the over-representation of minority groups mean that it should be a core social work concern. The paper outlines the ways, in which, risk and managerialism have sidelined core social work values in the CJS. It concludes that developments in the USA, particularly the decision in Brown v. Plata highlight a way out of the current impasse. Penal policy and conditions can only be reformed if the inherent dignity of offenders is rediscovered and placed at its centre

Optimal timing for managed relocation of species faced with climate change

Managed relocation is a controversial climate-adaptation strategy to combat negative climate change impacts on biodiversity. While the scientific community debates the merits of managed relocation(1-12), species are already being moved to new areas predicted to be more suitable under climate change(13,14). To inform these moves, we construct a quantitative decision framework to evaluate the timing of relocation in the face of climate change. We find that the optimal timing depends on many factors, including the size of the population, the demographic costs of translocation and the expected carrying capacities over time in the source and destination habitats. In some settings, such as when a small population would benefit from time to grow before risking translocation losses, haste is ill advised. We also find that active adaptive management(15,16) is valuable when the effect of climate change on source habitat is uncertain, and leads to delayed movement

Metal enrichment processes

There are many processes that can transport gas from the galaxies to their environment and enrich the environment in this way with metals. These metal enrichment processes have a large influence on the evolution of both the galaxies and their environment. Various processes can contribute to the gas transfer: ram-pressure stripping, galactic winds, AGN outflows, galaxy-galaxy interactions and others. We review their observational evidence, corresponding simulations, their efficiencies, and their time scales as far as they are known to date. It seems that all processes can contribute to the enrichment. There is not a single process that always dominates the enrichment, because the efficiencies of the processes vary strongly with galaxy and environmental properties.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Space Science Reviews, special issue "Clusters of galaxies: beyond the thermal view", Editor J.S. Kaastra, Chapter 17; work done by an international team at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), Bern, organised by J.S. Kaastra, A.M. Bykov, S. Schindler & J.A.M. Bleeke

Reciprocity as a foundation of financial economics

This paper argues that the subsistence of the fundamental theorem of contemporary financial mathematics is the ethical concept ‘reciprocity’. The argument is based on identifying an equivalence between the contemporary, and ostensibly ‘value neutral’, Fundamental Theory of Asset Pricing with theories of mathematical probability that emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of the ethical assessment of commercial contracts in a framework of Aristotelian ethics. This observation, the main claim of the paper, is justified on the basis of results from the Ultimatum Game and is analysed within a framework of Pragmatic philosophy. The analysis leads to the explanatory hypothesis that markets are centres of communicative action with reciprocity as a rule of discourse. The purpose of the paper is to reorientate financial economics to emphasise the objectives of cooperation and social cohesion and to this end, we offer specific policy advice