Is There a Criteria in Legal Writing That Can Guarantee Success
Writing can be an intellectually challenging task for young postgraduate law students or lawyers in their early years. This article aims at facilitating young lawyers to seek their 'voice' taking Competition Law and more precisely Resale Price Maintenance as an example in order to apply certain criteria, but also drawing on psychological aspects of writing that are absolutely vital in its success or failure.
An Arrow to the Heart: The Love and Death of Postmodern Legal Scholarship
This Article responds to two critiques of postmodern legal scholarship published by Dennis W. Arrow in the Michigan and Texas Law Reviews. Arrow raises the modernist criticisms that are most often leveled against postmodern legal scholars. If Arrow and the other critics were to be believed, postmodernists are muddle-headed thinkers who write indecipherable jargon-filled nonsense. Even worse, they are irresponsible nihilists who lack political convictions. Such criticisms of postmodernism are unpersuasive because the typical modernist depiction of postmodern legal thought is seriously inaccurate. It is little more than a caricature.The modernists, in other words, are imprecise and downright wrong. Now, some of the critics, including Arrow, might be smiling and thinking their response: 'Aha! You can’t even use the word ‘wrong’ without contradicting yourself because, after all, you’re a postmodernist. And postmodernism repudiates concepts like truth and falsity, and rightness and wrongness. And precision. How can a postmodernist demand precision with a straight face.' But this modernist response is precisely the problem. The typical modernist characterization of postmodernism - as rejecting all conceptions of rightness, goodness, and judgment - is wrong. And I use that word again purposefully to stress that concepts like truth and falsity, rightness and wrongness, and so forth are entirely consistent with postmodernism. Indeed, as explained in this Article, postmodernism explains how we understand such concepts in the first place.
Synergistic and antagonistic combinations of drugs in human prostate cancer cell lines in vitro
Microtubulin binding agents such as docetaxel have significant preclinical and clinical activity in the treatment of hormone-refractory prostate cancer. We have previously used median-effect analysis in vitro to define both synergistic and antagonistic drug combinations which may be of value in management of human disease. These studies extend our findings in defined prostate cancer cell lines. A semi-automated microtiter culture system was used. Docetaxel was combined with 18 other agents, incubated with DU 145, LnCaP or PC 3 prostate cancer cell lines for 72 h and the cells then incubated with MTT to determine cytotoxic effect. Both doublet and triplet combinations were examined. Synergy and antagonism as measured by the combination index were determined for each combination. The non-mutually exclusive criterion was applied. Docetaxel demonstrated cytotoxic additive effects or synergy with cis-retinoic acid, cyclosporin A and vinorelbine in all three cell lines. Docetaxel combined with either epirubicin or doxorubicin displayed cytotoxic synergistic effects in hormone-refractory DU 145 and PC 3 cell lines. In contrast, drugs which have been combined clinically to treat hormone-refractory prostate cancer, i.e. cisplatin, carboplatin or etoposide, were antagonistic when combined with docetaxel. We conclude that combinations of docetaxel with either cis-retinoic acid or vinorelbine may offer an enhanced cytotoxic effect in the management of hormone-refractory prostate cancer and need to be evaluated for therapeutic effect. The combination of docetaxel with an anthracycline was also synergistic in the two hormone-refractory cell lines, DU 145 and PC3, thus suggesting a potential role in advanced disease after endocrine failure. Combinations of docetaxel with platinum or etoposide may lead to subadditive effects in treatment.