Postmodern Professions? The Fragmentation of Legal Education and the Legal Profession

This article considers the institutional dimensions of professionalism and the legal profession's struggle with the challenges of post-modernity. An aspect of this is the Law Society's Training Framework Review (TFR) which promises changes to solicitors' education from 'cradle to grave'. The first part of the article analyses the structure and drivers of the TFR, their origins, and how they will be articulated. Secondly, the TFR is considered in the context of the political economy of higher education and its role in the new capitalism. Finally, we examine the potential effects of the TFR for the legal profession in the context of increasing practice segmentation and the threat of deprofessionalization, and also for the Law Society itself, whether it can retain a key role in the life course of the legal profession.     

Robotic method for the analysis of morphine and codeine in urine.

A totally automated procedure has been developed for the detection and quantitation of morphine and codeine in urine case samples. The samples were initially screened for these drugs by a Syva EMIT Toxicology System (ETS). A Zymate laboratory robotic system confirms positive samples from Syva ETS by performing the hydrolysis, extraction, and derivatization of morphine and codeine. The derivatized morphine and codeine were detected using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Enzymatic hydrolysis conditions were experimentally optimized during method development. The automation of these procedures has proven to be reliable and efficient.     

News media influences on public views of sentencing

Opinion polls in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere suggest that most members of the public would like their criminal courts to be harsher. Does media coverage of criminal sentencing contribute to a preference for harsher sentencing? Most people derive their information about sentencing from the news media and content analyses of news stories in Canada and the United States demonstrate that crimes of violence and sentences of imprisonment are overrepresented. Moreover, the news media provide little systematic information about the sentencing process or its underlying principles. This article reports the results of three studies examining the effects of media coverage on public opinion about sentencing. Subjects who read actual newspaper stories about sentencing that appeared in Canadian newspapers rated most reported sentences as too lenient. However, the specific account they read influenced their leniency judgments. Furthermore, in one experiment, participants assigned to read a newspaper account of a sentencing decision supported harsher sentences than participants who read a summary of actual court documents from the sentencing hearing.     

判决书体裁互文性之鉴衡

在对体裁进行文献综述的基础上，本文界定了体裁的基本特点；通过对互文性不同视角的考察，拟采用Fairclough关于互文性的分类，进一步明确体裁互文性的内涵。本文首先提出体裁互文性在判决书中的普遍性为真实命题的假设，然后通过法理与实例分析予以论证，其研究的目的不仅在于现象性探讨，更重要的在于揭示法学的语言学研究方法对于法学发展的意义。     

Temporal Limits on the Legislative Mandate: Entrenchment and Retroactivity

According to the general wisdom, legislatures lack both the power to "entrench" their enactments against alteration by their successors and the power to "retroactively" undo the efforts of their predecessors. The author argues that, rather than being in conflict, these principles share a common theme. Legislatures operate as agents of the people under constitutionally defined mandates that are limited in time as well as scope. Actions that transcend—either forward or backward in time—the temporal delegation of authority conferred by periodic elections do not bind the electorate. In the first half of the article the author suggests that an understanding of the rationale behind the entrenchment prohibition can help shed light on a diverse group of issues including congressional power to prescribe internal rules of operation, constitutional amendment procedures, and legislative impairment of contracts. In the second half of the article the author takes issue with the traditional objection to retroactivity grounded on vested rights and unfulfilled expectations. In its place he proposes a theory of retroactivity embodied in republican principles concerning the temporal relationship between the people and their legislative agents.