897 research outputs found
Making Good Lawyers
Today, the criticism of law schools has become an industry. Detractors argue that legal education fails to effectively prepare students for the practice of law, that it is too theoretical and detached from the profession, that it dehumanizes and alienates students, too expensive and inapt in helping students develop a sense of professional identity, professional values, and professionalism. In this sea of criticisms it is hard to see the forest from the trees. “There is so much wrong with legal education today,” writes one commentator, “that it is hard to know where to begin.” This article argues that any reform agenda will fall short if it does not start by recognizing the dominant influence of the culture of autonomous self-interest in legal education. Law schools engage in a project of professional formation and instill a very particular brand of professional identity. They educate students to become autonomously self-interested lawyers who see their clients and themselves as pursuing self-interest as atomistic actors. As a result, they understand that their primary role is to serve as neutral partisans who promote the narrow self-interest of clients without regard to the interests of their families, neighbors, colleagues, or communities and to the exclusion of counseling clients on the implications of those interests. They view as marginal their roles as an officer of the legal system and as a public citizen and accordingly place a low priority on traditional professional values, such as the commitment to the public good, that conflict with their primary allegiance to autonomous self-interest. In this work of professional formation, law schools are reflecting the values and commitments of the autonomously self-interested culture that is dominant in the legal profession. Therefore, even if law schools sought to form a professional identity outside of the mold of autonomous self-interest, such a commitment would require much more than curricular reform. It would, at minimum, require the construction of a persuasive alternative understanding of the lawyer’s role. The article seeks to offer such an understanding grounded in a relational perspective on lawyers and clients. Part I offers workable definitions of professionalism and professional identity that enable an informed discussion of the formation of professional identity in and by law schools. Part II explores what and how legal education teaches students showing that both institutionally (at the law school level) and individually (at the law professor level) legal education is proactively engaged in the formation of a professional identity of autonomous self-interest. Part II further explains that its dominance in legal education notwithstanding, autonomous self-interest is but one, often unpersuasive, account of professionalism and professional identity. Part III turns to the competing vision of relationally self-interested professionalism and professional identity and develops an outline for legal education grounded in these conceptions. Because legal education reflects a deep commitment to the dominant culture of autonomous self-interest, it is unlikely that reform proposals that are inconsistent with that culture are likely to succeed in the near future. Yet proposing an alternative account of professional identity that exposes the assumptions of the dominant culture, explains their limitations, and develops a more persuasive understanding is a necessary step toward providing a workable framework for reformers committed to promoting professional values in the long term
Dewetting-controlled binding of ligands to hydrophobic pockets
We report on a combined atomistic molecular dynamics simulation and implicit
solvent analysis of a generic hydrophobic pocket-ligand (host-guest) system.
The approaching ligand induces complex wetting/dewetting transitions in the
weakly solvated pocket. The transitions lead to bimodal solvent fluctuations
which govern magnitude and range of the pocket-ligand attraction. A recently
developed implicit water model, based on the minimization of a geometric
functional, captures the sensitive aqueous interface response to the
concave-convex pocket-ligand configuration semi-quantitatively
Slow relaxation of conductance of amorphous hopping insulators
We discuss memory effects in the conductance of hopping insulators due to
slow rearrangements of structural defects leading to formation of polarons
close to the electron hopping states. An abrupt change in the gate voltage and
corresponding shift of the chemical potential change populations of the hopping
sites, which then slowly relax due to rearrangements of structural defects. As
a result, the density of hopping states becomes time dependent on a scale
relevant to rearrangement of the structural defects leading to the excess time
dependent conductivity.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur
Limits to the 1/4 keV Extragalactic X-ray Background
We observed several nearby face-on spiral galaxies with the ROSAT PSPC. The
apparent deficiency in soft X-ray surface brightness observed at the outer
portion of their disks is consistent with the absorption of the extragalactic
soft X-ray background by material associated with these galaxies, and allows us
to place a lower limit on the intensity of this cosmologically important
background. From the depth of the soft X-ray shadow observed in NGC 3184, a 95%
confidence lower limit was derived to be at
1/4 keV. This was obtained by assuming that there is no unresolved 1/4 keV
X-ray emission from the outer region of the galaxy which may otherwise
partially fill in the shadow: any such emission, or any unresolved structure in
the absorbing gas, would imply a larger value. In the deepest exposure to date
in this energy range, Hasinger et al. (1993) resolved about at 1/4 keV into discrete sources; our current limit is
therefore consistent with an extragalactic origin for all of these sources. Our
results can also be directly compared with the corresponding upper limit
derived from the ROSAT PSPC detection of soft X-ray shadows cast by
high-latitude clouds in Ursa Major, at
1/4 keV. The lower and upper limits are only a factor of 2 apart, and begin to
provide a reasonable measurement of the intensity of the 1/4 keV extragalactic
X-ray background.Comment: 7 pages, no figures, a companion paper to the one titled "Diffuse
Soft X-ray Emission from Several Nearby Spiral Galaxies" (astro-ph/9604128).
To appear in September issue of ApJ (Vol. 468
Observed Limits on Charge Exchange Contributions to the Diffuse X-ray Background
We present a high resolution spectrum of the diffuse X-ray background from
0.1 to 1 keV for a ~1 region of the sky centered at l=90, b=+60 using a
36-pixel array of microcalorimeters flown on a sounding rocket. With an energy
resolution of 11 eV FWHM below 1 keV, the spectrum's observed line ratios help
separate charge exchange contributions originating within the heliosphere from
thermal emission of hot gas in the interstellar medium. The X-ray sensitivity
below 1 keV was reduced by about a factor of four from contamination that
occurred early in the flight, limiting the significance of the results. The
observed centroid of helium-like O VII is 568+2-3 eV at 90% confidence. Since
the centroid expected for thermal emission is 568.4 eV while for charge
exchange is 564.2 eV, thermal emission appears to dominate for this line
complex, consistent with much of the high-latitude O VII emission originating
in 2-3 x 10^6 K gas in the Galactic halo. On the other hand, the observed ratio
of C VI Ly gamma to Ly alpha is 0.3+-0.2. The expected ratios are 0.04 for
thermal emission and 0.24 for charge exchange, indicating that charge exchange
must contribute strongly to this line and therefore potentially to the rest of
the ROSAT R12 band usually associated with 10^6 K emission from the Local Hot
Bubble. The limited statistics of this experiment and systematic uncertainties
due to the contamination require only >32% thermal emission for O VII and >20%
from charge exchange for C VI at the 90% confidence level. An experimental gold
coating on the silicon substrate of the array greatly reduced extraneous
signals induced on nearby pixels from cosmic rays passing through the
substrate, reducing the triggered event rate by a factor of 15 from a previous
flight of the instrument.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, to be published in Ap
The thermal equation of state of FeTiO_3 ilmenite based on in situ X-ray diffraction at high pressures and temperatures
We present in situ measurements of the unit-cell volume of a natural terrestrial ilmenite (Jagersfontein mine, South Africa) and a synthetic reduced ilmenite (FeTiO_3) at simultaneous high pressure and high temperature up to 16 GPa and 1273 K. Unit-cell volumes were determined using energy-dispersive synchrotron X-ray diffraction in a multi-anvil press. Mössbauer analyses show that the synthetic sample contained insignificant amounts of Fe^(3+) both before and after the experiment. Results were fit to Birch-Murnaghan thermal equations of state, which reproduce the experimental data to within 0.5 and 0.7 GPa for the synthetic and natural samples, respectively. At ambient conditions, the unit-cell volume of the natural sample [V_0 = 314.75 ± 0.23 (1 ) Å^3] is significantly smaller than that of the synthetic sample [V_0 = 319.12 ± 0.26 Å^3]. The difference can be attributed to the presence of impurities and Fe^(3+) in the natural sample. The 1 bar isothermal bulk moduli K_(T0) for the reduced ilmenite is slightly larger than for the natural ilmenite (181 ± 7 and 165 ± 6 GPa, respectively), with pressure derivatives K_0' = 3 ± 1. Our results, combined with literature data, suggest that the unit-cell volume of reduced ilmenite is significantly larger than that of oxidized ilmenite, whereas their thermoelastic parameters are similar. Our data provide more appropriate input parameters for thermo-chemical models of lunar interior evolution, in which reduced ilmenite plays a critical role
Searching for keV Sterile Neutrino Dark Matter with X-ray Microcalorimeter Sounding Rockets
High-resolution X-ray spectrometers onboard suborbital sounding rockets can
search for dark matter candidates that produce X-ray lines, such as decaying
keV-scale sterile neutrinos. Even with exposure times and effective areas far
smaller than XMM-Newton and Chandra observations, high-resolution, wide
field-of-view observations with sounding rockets have competitive sensitivity
to decaying sterile neutrinos. We analyze a subset of the 2011 observation by
the X-ray Quantum Calorimeter instrument centered on Galactic coordinates l =
165, b = -5 with an effective exposure of 106 seconds, obtaining a limit on the
sterile neutrino mixing angle of sin^2(2 theta) < 7.2e-10 at 95% CL for a 7 keV
neutrino. Better sensitivity at the level of sin^2(2 theta) ~ 2.1e-11 at 95\%
CL for a 7 keV neutrino is achievable with future 300-second observations of
the galactic center by the Micro-X instrument, providing a definitive test of
the sterile neutrino interpretation of the reported 3.56 keV excess from galaxy
clusters.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Ap
The Microcalorimeter Arrays for a Rhenium Experiment (MARE): a next-generation calorimetric neutrino mass experiment
Neutrino oscillation experiments have proved that neutrinos are massive
particles, but can't determine their absolute mass scale. Therefore the
neutrino mass is still an open question in elementary particle physics. An
international collaboration is growing around the project of Microcalorimeter
Arrays for a Rhenium Experiment (MARE) for directly measuring the neutrino mass
with a sensitivity of about 0.2eV/c2. Many groups are joining their experiences
and technical expertise in a common effort towards this challenging experiment.
We discuss the different scenarios and the impact of MARE as a complement of
KATRIN.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure Nucl. Instr. Meth. A, proceedings of LTD11
workshop, Tokyo 200
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