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.
Design and synthesis of water-soluble prodrugs of rifabutin for intraveneous administration.
Acinetobacter baumannii is a gram-negative bacterium causing severe hospital-acquired infections such as bloodstream infections or pneumonia. Moreover, multidrug resistant A. baumannii becomes prevalent in many hospitals. Consequently, the World Health Organization made this bacterium a critical priority for the research and development of new antibiotics. Rifabutin, a semisynthetic product from the rifamycin class, was recently found to be very active in nutrient-limited eukaryotic cell culture medium against various A. baumannii strains, including extremely drug-resistant strains, with minimal inhibitory concentrations as low as 0.008 μg/mL. Moreover, this in vitro potency translates into in vivo efficacy. Thus, rifabutin appears to be an attractive novel antibiotic against A. baumannii. In this work, our objective was to design and synthetize rifabutin prodrugs with increased aqueous solubility to allow intraveneous use. Synthetic methodologies were developed to selectively functionalize the hydroxyl group in position 21 and to afford 17 prodrugs. We measured the water solubility of the prodrugs, the stability in human and mouse plasma and their antimicrobial activity against A. baumannii after incubation in human serum. Finally, a pharmacokinetic release study of rifabutin was performed in CD1 mice with three selected prodrugs as a proof of concept.