Contrasting Points Of View Research Articles

Lawyers in the Market: Delivering Legal Services in Europe

The creation of the Single European Market (SEM) presents lawyers with both an opportunity to provide legal services and a challenge to meet legal needs and to be competitive domestically and internationally. The stimulation of competition and trade in Europe and beyond, encouraged by a burgeoning of national and European regulation, is likely to lead to an increased demand for legal services across a wide field of legal practice. The opportunity to provide legal services and the challenge of meeting the demand for legal services are not new. In the last two decades or so, the way law firms are organized and the nature of services provided have been transformed in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and western society generally.1 Several contrasting viewpoints on this transformation have emerged. Some have focussed mainly on the profession and its response to an increasingly competitive market;2 others on the conjunction between organizational imperatives within the law firm and changes in the legal and business environment;3 others still have put the main spotlight on the market for legal services itself. This chapter focuses on lawyers and the market, in the context of the Single European Market. The creation of the SEM promises a great expansion in the market for legal services. The declared goals of the SEM, combined with the use of law to achieve them; the emphasis on the need to create competitive advantage; and the likely increase in the size of the SEM all point in this direction. These will be considered in the first part. Law firms have begun restructuring in response. Some examples are presented in the second part. At the same time, barriers still exist in the market for legal services in Europe. These will be considered in the third part. In the final part, some implications of lawyers in the SEM will be reviewed.

Contrasting viewpoint

Contrasting viewpoint

Heterogeneous groups: A legitimate alternative

Discussions of appropriate selection procedures and optimal group composition have occurred since the beginning of group therapy and have been as inconclusive as the literature has been voluminous. Although empirical grounds for relating selection criteria to outcome are lacking (Erickson, 1984a), pragmatic considerations relative to modern inpatient psychiatric practice argue for the acceptance of heterogeneous groups as a legitimate alternative. In order to make this case I will first mention the shortcomings of various demographic and diagnostic variables as selection criteria, will touch on the problem of selecting for involvement in groups on the basis of specific complaints or skill deficits, and will share some preliminary data related to information processing and problem-solving skill deficits among certain of our inpatients that cut across diagnoses and, if anything, would suggest other grounds for group selection. I will review the constraints imposed on group therapists in contemporary hospital practice. My history has been with the VA system so my comments should be understood to apply to public service hospitals serving chronic populations who present with limited means. Finally, I will relate these discussions to the issue of inpatient group selection and group composition, arguing for random assignment to free interaction groups and a policy of pragmatism and flexibility with regard to the leading of these groups. My goal is to suggest that heterogeneous groups are the only coherent and plausible option on many inpatient units, given the nature of the patient population and the constraints of the setting. For a greater elaboration of some of these points, see Erickson (1984a) and, for a somewhat contrasting point of view, Yalom (1983).

The Regulation of Plant Communities by the Food Chains Exploiting Them

THE REGULATION OF PLANT COMMUNITIES BY THE FOOD CHAINS EXPLOITING THEM STEPHEN D. FRETWELL* I. Introduction A. DEVELOPMENT OF THE HYPOTHESIS In 1960, three ecologists at the University of Michigan proposed a "balance of nature" hypothesis: N. Hairston, F. Smith, and L. Slobodkin [1], hereafter denoted HSS. Basically, they argued that most plant material had some sort of grazer which potentially could reduce that part of the plant community to rarity or worse. Since this did not happen ("The world is green," they observed), they supposed that something was keeping these grazers in check. The something was probably a predator population. These arguments led the theorists to conclude that the predators, as a group, were limited in abundance by the amount of food they could find and capture; grazers as a group were predator limited, with their abundance held so low by predators that the plants they fed on, being free of too much grazer pressure, were, as a group, limited in abundance by the amount of resources (mostly water or nitrogen) they could find. This idea has attracted a lot of attention, has been widely disagreed with, but has never been ignored. The leading critics, Murdoch [2] and Ehrlich and Birch [3], emphasized the need of developing the hypothesis to the point where it will make testable predictions. HSS [4] responded to this criticism by demonstrating that, even in its present state, the hypothesis was already useful. This interaction preceded the recent full awakening of ecology as a predictive science [5], and so the *Division of Biology, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66502. John Zimmerman first raised the problem that this theory attempts to solve. Both he and Dick Marzolf provided the initial discussion that helped the theory to evolve. Sievert Rohwer, Dan Bowen, Bob Hirsch, and Lauri Oksanen helped to develop the arguments, and Chris Smith provided some contrasting viewpoints. The Summer 1972 environmental biology class at Kansas State University and Chip Taylor's organization for tropical ecology course in Costa Rica in Spring 1972 further helped to crystallize the theory. During some of the course of the study, I was supported by NSF GB- 14293. Sharon Martin and Sue Hughes prepared the manuscript. I am grateful to all these persons for their help. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · Winter 1977 | 169 situation rested. There are many more recent citations of the HSS idea, but it can hardly be thought of as widely accepted. Hurlburt, Zedier, and Fairbanks [6] recently conducted an experiment in which they added predators to a nearly vegetation-free aquatic system containing plants and grazers. As the food chain hypothesis would predict, the predators controlled the grazers, and the plants expanded in size and numbers. Eventually, the aquarium became quite "green," resembling the forests that the Michigan theorists were trying to explain. Hurlburt and his colleagues did not cite HSS, perhaps not realizing that their work confirmed it experimentally. Wiegert and Owen [7], however, made some observations that suggested a way the theory could be expanded. They looked at four-link and two-link food chains and noted some differences in grazing pressure and plant morphology. Simultaneously, John Zimmerman and I were writing a proposal analyzing some old-field food chains that were clearly four links. We decided to see if the three-link HSS theory could be modified to fit our needs. This led us also to think about how the arguments used by HSS applied to different food chain lengths. The proposal was never funded, but the exercise turned out to be most useful. The hypothesis that emerged relates food chain length, primary productivity, and ecological efficiency to the way plant communities are structured. It extends and generalizes the 1960 hypothesis and makes many testable predictions. B. PREDICTIONS ABOUT WHAT? The primary question that prompted the HSS study was, Why is the world green? Why are not plants all eaten up? From my point of view, sitting near a Kansas shortgrass prairie instead of Michigan forest, it is not an obvious question, and I might expand it. Why are some parts of the world green and some parts (like Kansas grasslands) usually brown? As I inspect a Kansas marshland bordered by hills...

Nutrition and the Food Supply: Controversies and Prospects

THERE SEEM TO BE two opposing views on the question of supplying people with food. The first cites the example of Bangladesh and other countries where starvation seems inevitable, and states that it is useless or even counterproductive prevent people in such countries from starving. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for this viewpoint is Garrett Hardin, who summarized his position in a BioScience article (Hardin 1974). He metaphorically places the rich nations in a lifeboat from which the poor must be excluded or everyone will drown. Another spokesman is Dillon Ripley, who predicts that morality will increasingly lose its traditional foundation and questions of the sanctity of human lives will have be judged on a long-term strategic basis (Ripley 1971). Lamont Cole has been quoted as saying to feed a starving child is exacerbate the overpopulation problem (Yannacone 1970). The contrasting viewpoint, which I hold, is that such attitudes are ethically repugnant, of questionable authenticity, and, perhaps most significant of all, are a threat world peace. In addition, my conditioning has been much shaped by my professional activities which, for about 45 years, have been directed towards solving agricultural problems, remedying nutritional deficiencies, and promoting public health. All these objectives contribute the population explosion.

Contrasting viewpoints regarding the nature and psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personalities: a preliminary communication.

Contrasting viewpoints regarding the nature and psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personalities: a preliminary communication.

Chemical Composition of Illite

Illite, as it was defined, may vary in composition over as wide a spectrum as the range of compositions of diverse detrital and authigenic micaceous minerals. From a contrasting viewpoint, however, reference minerals of illite have been proposed whose compositions are defined sharply, almost uniquely. This paper reports data and an interpretation that reconciles the two differing viewpoints of illite composition. Free energies of formation of six separate illites were calculated from aqueous dissolution data on six different illites. Illitic parent materials, whether detrital, from solution, authigenic, or diagenetic, apparently have reacted with their aqueous environments to yield uniformly lowest-energy final products consistent with parent material and environments. Because the marine, or alternatively, fresh-water non-marine, environments have been relatively uniform during geologic time, the final compositions of illite parent materials will tend to move also toward uniformity in energy, and in consistency with the parent materials present. This offers a thermodynamic basis for proposing reference illite minerals whose compositions are much narrower in range than those of original detrital micas, although the latter fulfill the definition of illite.

The Future of Higher Education for Negroes

A study of the comparatively brief history of formal education for Negroes reveals two somewhat contrasting points of view from which educators have envisioned the task that this particular education is to perform. The earlier and by far the more persistent of these points of view had its inception shortly after the Civil War when Negro education was an untilled but fertile field. At that time a definition of educational did not permit of much debate. The problem was one of providing a type of education which would concern itself with the practical necessities of life of some four million people who had been thrown on their own inadequate resources almost overnight. It was important that major emphasis be given the social and vocational aspects of such an education; the first because the Negro must now assume the stature of a free man and a citizen, the second because he must also become economically self-supporting. Oddly enough, many of the first attempts to establish Negro schools, particularly the majority of the Negro colleges, took proper cognizance of neither of these aspects. It was somewhat paradoxical that before any educational point of view was definitely established, more emphasis was given to courses in Greek and Latin than to courses concerned with simple home-making and the immediate practical problems of life. The establishment of such traditional courses in schools so ill-adapted to them was undoubtedly due largely to the classical training of the persons who were instrumental in starting these schools. It was also due in some measure to the fact that nothing better, at least from the point of view of Negro education, had been found or was likely to permit such quick results. In those early days of Reconstruction Negro education was almost entirely a product of Northern Philanthropy and missionary zeal. Coming down from the North were many white teachers who had more of a genuine and sympathetic interest in the uplift and welfare of the Negro than a knowledge of how his particular educational needs might be met. Certainly many of these teachers must have at one time or another marveled at the sight of a former field-hand with a copy of Cicero in his hand, and not a few probably wondered whither the new education would lead. At any rate, it was not long before educators began to realize that the traditional classical type of education would solve neither the social nor economic problems of the Negro. Hence it was inevitable that at this point there should begin a somewhat rapid change toward the point of view of vocational education. While this change must be attributed to many things, it was largely influenced by a handful of educators who had already begun to preach the doctrine of the practical. Samuel Chapman Armstrong had already founded Hampton Insti-