Public guardianship

Conclusion Public guardianship provides a useful means of providing care for a very vulnerable group of people—the incapacitated. This vulnerability requires that special care be taken to assure that the guardian does not subordinate the ward's interests to any other considerations. Such subordination of the ward's interests may be inadvertent or well intentioned. It may even, on occasion, be consistent with broader social or governmental policies. Nevertheless, it is a violation of the guardian's duty of loyalty.This article has discussed several methods for reducing the likelihood that the ward's rights will be infringed. Ultimately, however, the avoidance of improprieties and the maintenance of incapacitated persons in dignity depends not on procedural or managerial devices, but on the loyalty of the guardian to the interests of his or her ward.     

Ordinary Heroes vs. Failed Lawyers—Public Interest Litigation in Erin Brockovich and Other Contemporary Films

Although feature films may overpraise lawyers and civil courts as means of securing justice, they caricature lawyers and litigation. Analysis of Erin Brockovich (directed by Steven Soderbergh and produced by Danny DeVito, et al., 2000) reveals four motifs—two favorable and two unfavorable to public‐interest litigants and litigation—that characterize similar films in the last decades: Class Action (1991), The Rainmaker (1997), The Sweet Hereafter (1997), A Civil Action (1998), The Insider (1999), Runaway Jury (2003), and North Country (2005). These filmic populist romances promote ordinary heroines (mostly) who redeem a problematic system through common sense and everyday virtue rather than through laws, lawyers, and litigation.