'Portrait of a profession revisited'

On the walls of my private office hang the photographs of my seven distinguished predecessors as Secretary of the Cabinet. I sometimes find myself staring at them for inspiration, not always successfully I admit. A week or two ago I found myself looking at the great Lord Bridges, Secretary of the Cabinet and War Cabinet from 1938 to 1946. I wondered what he would have made of it if in the space of a week one of his predecessors had published an article in The Spectator advertised as ‘The Descent of the Civil Servant’ and another had appeared on the Frost programme to reassure the world that the Service was still in good shape. Both predecessors, Lords Butler and Armstrong, I hasten to say, were acting in the most supportive spirit and spoke from what for all of us is a deeply shared view of the role of the Civil Service. But, staring at Bridges, I could see a bubble emerging from his mouth enquiring: what precisely is happening on your watch, Sir Richard?     

Posttraumatic stress disorder in murderers

Three case histories of men who suffered posttraumatic stress disorders after committing homicides are presented. These men were relatively young and had chaotic childhoods and minimal criminal histories. Each had killed a woman with whom he had a significant but intensely turbulent emotional relationship. The killings all occurred during altered mental states that were unrelated to the use of drugs or alcohol. The clinical significance and some of the medicolegal implications of this phenomenon are discussed.     

Nations hospitable to organized crime and terrorism

This report assesses conditions that contribute to or are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world during the period 1999–2002. Although the focus of the report is on transnational activity, domestic criminal activity is recognized as a key foundation for transnational crime, especially as the forces of globalization intensify. The report has been arranged geographically into the following major headings: Africa, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Within the geographical headings, the report addresses individual countries with particularly salient conditions. Cases such as the Triborder Area (TBA) of South America and East and West Africa, where conditions largely overlap national borders, have been treated as regions rather than by imposing an artificial delineation by country. The bibliography has been divided into the same geographical headings as the text. The major sources for this report are recent periodical reports from Western and regional sources, Internet sites offering credible recent information, selected recent monographs, and personal communications with regional experts. Treatment of individual countries varies according to the extent and seriousness of conditions under study. Thus some countries in a region are not discussed, and others are discussed only from the perspective of one or two pertinent activities or conditions. Because they border the United States, Canada and Mexico have received especially extensive treatment.     

Legal Disciplinary Practices – Who Needs Them?

The recent publication of the government's Review of the Regulatory Framework for Legal Services in England and Walesin March 2004 heralds a new era regarding the way in which legal services are to be delivered to the public. In the wake of the Enron-Arthur Andersen debacle, and growing disenchantment amongst policy-makers and market players with the involvement of 'elite' accountancy firms in the provision of legal services, interest and attention has now shifted away from the formation of Multi-Disciplinary Practices towards a new model of legal services provider– Legal Disciplinary Practices (LDPs), where the focus is at all times on the provision of legal services, albeit widely defined. The purpose of this article is to explore, and subsequently critique, the rationales behind the formation of LDPs and to outline the dangers which the provision of legal services through such business structures is likely to pose not only for the legal profession, but also for society more generally.     

Writing and the flesh of others

Prologue: Feminism and Fictocriticism in Australia The article that follows makes use of a selection of psychoanalytic writings to explore what theoretical writing on intertextuality so often occludes: that is, the dynamics of the passionate dimension of intertextual practices, by which I mean the fantasies of writers (and readers) that attend the actual practices of literary borrowings, in.uences, apprenticeships, and hauntings—by other writers, by the music of words, by memories. For the author may be dead, but writing subjects are very much alive and embodied—capable of moving and being moved, of remembering and forgetting, of relationships both real and imaginary with other writers living or dead, of love and of murder.