The Future and Legal Education: Are Law Schools Failing and,If So,How?

In Failing Law Schools (2010), Brian Tamanaha recommends that law schools respond to the current economic crisis in the legal profession by reducing support for faculty research and developing two‐year degree programs. But these ideas respond only to a short‐term problem that will probably be solved by the closure of marginal institutions. The real challenge lies in the powerful long‐term trends that animate social change, particularly the shift to a knowledge‐based economy and the demand for social justice through expanded public services. These trends demand that law schools transform their educational programs to reflect the regulatory, transactional, and interdisciplinary nature of modern legal practice.     

Professionalizing Prison: Primitive Professionalization and the Administrative Defense of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1879

This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deployed a series of evolving discursive strategies aimed at establishing themselves as professionals long before more formal, field‐wide efforts to professionalize criminal justice. These strategies allowed Eastern's administrators to establish their professional status without traditional status markers of national networks, college degrees, or special training, which emerged later. Beyond illustrating a new pathway to professionalization, examining criminal justice professionalization at this early stage illuminates the early prison's precarious position and the internecine warfare among actors competing to control its meaning.     

Vacuum collection of gunpowder residues from clothing worn by shooting suspects, and their analysis by GC/TEA, IMS, and GC/MS

Experiments were conducted to collect gunpowder (propellant) residues from shooters' clothing by vacuum and to analyze them by gas chromatography/thermal energy analyzer (GC/TEA), ion mobility spectrometry (IMS), and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). The residues were collected on fiberglass and Teflon filters using the portable vacuum sampler, all supplied with the IMS instrument. Several solvents were examined for the extraction of the propellant components from the filters. The extracts were centrifuged and/or filtered, concentrated by evaporation, and analyzed without any additional clean-up procedure. Based on the results of the study, an operational method for analysis of gunpowder residues was introduced into casework without changing the present operational technique for gunshot (primer) residue (GSR) analysis on clothing implemented by the Israel Police. In the modified method, the clothing is first sampled by double-side adhesive-coated aluminum stubs (the tape-lift method) for GSR analysis (the existing method), followed by vacuum collection for propellant residue examination. The issue of interpretation of the analytical results is discussed.