“Fitting in” and “opting out”: exploring how law students self-select law firm employers

In this paper we draw on interviews with 15 law students at the University of Birmingham in the UK to explore the extent to which law students critically self-evaluate themselves against their perceptions of the preferences of elite law firms. While our conclusions are necessarily tentative, we show how some law students “opt out” of applying to certain law firms where they perceive there is no fit between themselves and that law firm. Equally, our data also shows that some students recognise that, despite not having a supplementary fit with a firm (i.e. they can see that they do not “match” that firm’s current crop of lawyers or what they think is the firm’s culture), they realise that they can instead be a complementary fit for the firm, and hence realise that their potential to add something “new” to the law firm (by way of increasing diversity) can secure them a vacation scheme placement or a training contract. Finally, a proportion of students play “the numbers game” and despite determining a law firm “misfit”, still proceed to apply to as many law firms as possible as they thought that more applications meant a higher chance of success.     

PACT: A Collaborative Team Model for Treating High Conflict Families in Family Court

This article describes a court‐community model program for high conflict divorced families that is designed to reduce the level of inter‐parental conflict including: a) child exposure to inter‐parental conflict; and b) the frequency of re‐litigation over residential arrangements and parenting plans. The six‐session (16‐hour) program combines conflict resolution and group/community support. The program provides a “Personal Support Team” and “Personal Plan of Action” to help each parent control emotions and maintain agreement. The results of research conducted to explore the effect of the program on level of triangulation and inter‐parental conflict, as well as the frequency of re‐litigation over parenting plans, residential arrangements, and parenting time are reported.     

EPSAS—Worrying the Wrong End of the Stick?

The ultimate objective of the European Public Sector Accounting Standards (EPSAS) project is for the European Union (EU) to improve budgetary surveillance of its member states through more reliable statistics. The objective of this article is to analyze the EPSAS decision and discuss the efficacy of the proposed solution. Harmonization is already present through national accounting rules; will more standardization do the trick? Is the problem really being dealt with, or is it just an attempt by the EU to appear to be doing the right thing while the real issue is ignored? This article suggests that targeting governmental accounting systems for this purpose may prove futile.     

Civil society,hybridity and peacebuilding in Burundi: questioning authenticity

Critics argue that liberal peacebuilding has resulted in the creation of a civil society populated with organisations that are artificial and externalised. These associations are contrasted with more locally-based groups that are considered to be more authentic and better able to build a hybrid peace that is emancipatory. At first glance, this characterisation appears to describe civil society in post-war Burundi, but on closer inspection a much more complex and interesting picture is revealed which challenges existing conceptualisations of post-conflict civil society. The paper finds that even associations that are deeply rooted in local communities are composites forged through their encounters with the global. Furthermore, this hybridity is not new. Rather it is the product of decades of prior hybridisation, raising important questions about the authenticity and legitimacy of these organisations and, ultimately, their ability to promote a peace that is transformative.     

An exploratory comparative analysis of the use of metaphors in writing on the Internet and mobile phones

Scant attention has been paid to the use of figures of speech in describing mobile telephony and how it is used. While there are isolated cases, as yet there is no study of metaphor use across a larger corpus of mobile phone research. This article addresses this gap by developing a preliminary survey, or mapping, of the use of metaphors and other discursive figures and tropes in the available literature on mobile phones. It does this by using metaphors in Internet literature as a springboard for comparative analysis, as a comparable communications medium. Both for their general role as communications technologies and their specific historicized position as “new media”, and with their capacities increasingly overlapping, mobile phones and the Internet form a useful counterpoint. The article summarizes the key findings from earlier work mapping and critiquing the use of metaphor in the critical and popular writing on the Internet. It then compares and contrasts these Internet-based metaphors against those in the mobile literature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the perils and the promise of metaphor use in writing on communications technologies.     

Rights: Beyond Interest Theory and Will Theory?

Law and Philosophy -     

Philosophy on messick and social conflict: Resolving the resolution process

In a recent paper, Messick described a framework for understanding the often intractable nature of social conflict, and suggested a method (the Messick Method) of resolving such conflict. My aim in this paper is to examine Messick’s approach from a philosophical perspective. More specifically, the question to be addressed is whether a philosophical method of resolution might, in some significant way, be superior to the Messick Method. The conclusion is that a collaboration of both methods, in the spirit of Messick’s suggestion, can contribute to resolving social conflict.     

Exploring the Impacts of Ordinary Laboratory Alterations During Forensic DNA Processing on Peak Height Variation,Thresholds, and Probability of Dropout,

Impacts of validation design on DNA signal were explored, and the level of variation introduced by injection, capillary changes, amplification, and kit lot was surveyed by examining a set of replicate samples ranging in mass from 0.25 to 0.008 ng. The variations in peak height, heterozygous balance, dropout probabilities, and baseline noise were compared using common statistical techniques. Data indicate that amplification is the source of the majority of the variation observed in the peak heights, followed by capillary lots. The use of different amplification kit lots did not introduce variability into the peak heights, heterozygous balance, dropout, or baseline. Thus, if data from case samples run over a significant time period are not available during validation, the validation must be designed to, at a minimum, include the amplification of multiple samples of varying quantity, with known genotype, amplified and run over an extended period of time using multiple pipettes and capillaries.