ABA

The American Bar Association’s (“ABA”) practice of requiring students to purchase the Model Rules of Professional Conduct is exploitative and unethical. The ABA uses its role in training lawyers to create a situation which all but requires law students and bar applicants to purchase the organization’s own Model Rules.  The fact that the Model Rules constitute a substantial revenue stream for the ABA is due less to lawyers’ desire to brush up on Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are not laws, than to the ABA's direct role in approving law schools and its indirect role in licensing lawyers.

Law schools must maintain ABA-approved status to remain in business.  The ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools require that students take a course in legal ethics.  Not only must law students take a course in legal ethics, but those courses must also include instruction in the ABA's ethics rules.  Furthermore, nearly all jurisdictions require bar applicants pass the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination (“MPRE”) to become a licensed lawyer.  The MPRE is based substantially on the Model Rules.  The ABA has thus used its role in training lawyers to create a situation that essentially requires law students and bar applicants to purchase the organization’s own Model Rules.

The ABA’s decision to make its ethics rules a commodity, spanning twenty years, together with the National Conference Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) desire to nationalize testing by using the Model Rules, cultivates the dangerous view that testing checks for those inclined to unethical behavior.  In light of the ABA’s successful efforts to wring even more revenue from financially-burdened law students, the creation of an essay examination in ethics sounds less like a call to renewed professionalism than a pitch for another product for the NCBE to sell to state bar examiners.  It is a bureaucratic culture’s last-gasp effort, one that should be rejected firmly and finally.

Applied Behaviour Analysis is often referred to as ABA. ABA is one of the most well established, commonly utilized and best researched intervention used with children with Autism. (Granpeesheh, 2010)  It is generally accepted and agreed that ABA has most effect when sought as an early intervention (usually before the age of 5) and applied regularly and consistently. It is this application that the paper seeks to better understand; in order to better offer practical solutions to meet the increase in demand.

In other words, repeating more and more of the same repetitive and often strictly enforced regimented and routine “therapy” that is either not showing any results or causing worsening of the symptoms is a clear indicator that it is causing more harm than good. And this damage is caused as a result of "hard wiring" of those erroneous pathways in the brain formed due to the repetitive behaviors as administered by the therapy under rigorous conditions, often with an uninterested and "uncooperative" child. This causes stress and leads to stunting the growth and creative abilities of the autistic child.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” - Albert Einstein

This article highlights how repetitive behavior modification based therapies in autism such as ABA (Applied Behavior
Analysis) is causing damage to the brain and stunting the growth and creativity of the autistic child and how “Early Intervention” in autism with these kinds of “Intensive” therapies is actually delaying the recovery of the autistic child from the limiting symptoms of Autism.Read More ...

The American Bar Association’s (“ABA”) practice of requiring students to purchase the Model Rules of Professional Conduct is exploitative and unethical. The ABA uses its role in training lawyers to create a situation which all but requires law students and bar applicants to purchase the organization’s own Model Rules. The fact that the Model Rules constitute a substantial revenue stream for the ABA is due less to lawyers’ desire to brush up on Model Rules of Professional Conduct, which are not laws, than to the ABA's direct role in approving law schools and its indirect role in licensing lawyers. Law schools must maintain ABA-approved status to remain in business. The ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools require that students take a course in legal ethics. Not only must law students take a course in legal ethics, but those courses must also include instruction in the ABA's ethics rules. Furthermore, nearly all jurisdictions require bar applicants pass the Multistate Pro...

The single-gene male-sterile 7B-1 mutant in tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) shows reduced de-etiolation of hypocotyl growth, has an elevated level of endogenous abscisic acid (ABA) and reduced amounts of growth-active gibberellins (GAs), is supersensitive to exogenous ABA, and is resistant to abiotic stresses in light but not in the dark. The existence of crosstalk between light signaling and plant hormones, and the interaction of ABA and GA biosynthetic pathways with ethylene, led us to investigate the possible role of ethylene in the 7B-1 mutant. In the dark, 7B-1 seedlings exhibited the normal triple response to 1-aminocyclopropane–1-carboxylic acid (ACC), an ethylene precur-sor, similar to the wild type. In light, however, hypocotyl growth of mutant seedlings was more sensitive to ACC but less sensitive to the inhibitors of ethylene’s action, such as silver thiosulfate, than the wild type. The 7B-1 mutant seedlings produced reduced levels of ethylene, which could account ...

The decision to attend law school in the 21st century requires an increasingly significant financial investment, yet very little information about the value of a legal education is available for prospective law students. Prospectives use various tools provided by schools and third parties while seeking to make an informed decision about which law school to attend. This Article surveys the available information with respect to one important segment of the value analysis: post-graduation employment outcomes.

One of the most pressing issues with current access to information is the ability to hide outcomes in aggregate statistical forms. Just about every tool enables this behavior, which, while misleading, often complies with the current ABA and U.S. News reporting standards. In this Article, we propose a new standard for employment reporting grounded in compromise. Our hope is that this standard enables prospectives to take a detailed, holistic look at the diverse employment options from different law schools. In time, improved transparency at American law institutions can produce generations of lawyers who were better informed about the range of jobs obtainable with a law degree.

Law school has long been thought of as an investment in human capital inherently worth consuming. This is a dated view. Today, entering the legal profession through law school requires an increasingly significant financial investment. Yet very little information about the value of a legal education is available for prospective law students. In fact, much of the information tends to mislead rather than inform aspiring lawyers.

This Article surveys the available information with respect to one important segment of the value analysis: post-graduation employment outcomes. It then proposes a new standard for the presentation of post-graduation outcomes, "The LST Proposal." Our hope is that this standard enables prospectives to take a detailed, holistic look at the diverse employment options from different law schools.

This white paper builds on an earlier version, first published in April 2010. The original set forth an exposé of the available law school employment information and proposed a way for law schools to voluntarily release better information. This Article updates descriptions of the current employment information, explains the recent reforms at the ABA Section of Legal Education that followed from the original paper, and offers a new proposal for the Section of Legal Education to adopt for the betterment of the legal profession.

By comparison between two Dunaliella species, differing in B-carotene accumulation potential, the interrelationship between B-carotene and ABA production was investigated. Both D. salina MUR8 and D. viridis MUR29 (as higher and lower B-carotene accumulators, respectively) responded to salt-stress by an increase in ABA levels at initial hours after the imposition of hypersaline stress. But ABA enhancement was considerably higher in D. salina than that in D. viridis. The high level of ABA was transient in stressed D. salina and it had returned near to basal levels, but remained higher than control. In contrast to ABA levels, B-carotene content declined at the point of ABA enhancement in D. salina but not in D. viridis. After 24 hours exposure to salt stress, B-carotene accumulation was observed in D. salina. There were no significant changes of B-carotene in D. viridis. These results showed that D. salina appears more capable to response to salt stress by producing higher levels of AB...

The purpose of my essay Playing Chicken: An Instant History of the Battle over Exceptions to Client Confidentiality, is to offer a pointillist history of the recent battles between the ABA and the federal government concerning 1) when lawyers may or must disclose client confidences, and 2) claims that the federal government is attacking the attorney-client privilege. In doing so, I hope to explain how this battle is representative of the current drift in the American legal profession.

After the Introduction, the essay unfolds as follows: Section II traces the ABA’s often schizophrenic understanding of the duty of confidentiality and exceptions to that duty from the 1908 Canons of Ethics to the adoption by the ABA of the 1969 Code of Professional Responsibility, and the re-conceptualization of that duty found in the adoption in 1983 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct. The ABA’s expansion of the duty of lawyers to keep confidences, even confidences that concerning ongoing fraud by the client, occurred after the discussion of the attorney-client privilege and its exceptions proposed by the drafters of the Federal Rules of Evidence between 1969 and 1973. The consonance between the 1969 Code and the 1975 Federal Rules of Evidence concerning the limits of the duty of confidentiality was shredded in the reaction to the ABA’s Discussion Draft of the Model Rules in January 1980. The drafts and debates concerning what became Model Rule 1.6 offer an initial demonstration of “playing chicken” by assorted lawyer interest groups as well as by the ABA, as exceptions to the duty of confidentiality became more narrowed, a narrowing justified by a claim that lawyers owe a nearly unfettered duty of loyalty to clients. Section III examines why states largely rejected Model Rule 1.6 between 1983 and the late 1990s and describes several corporate scandals from the late 1980s involving lawyer (mis)conduct. Section IV offers an instant history of the debate over when a lawyer may or must disclose client confidences beginning in 2001.

My thesis is that when an ABA Task Force offered to make the disclosure of some client confidences mandatory, it did so not for reasons of principle, but for reasons of power. After succeeding in limiting the effect of SEC regulation of lawyer conduct in the aftermath of Sarbanes-Oxley, the ABA began in late 2004 a new effort, engaging in a concerted attack on the government’s alleged “erosion” of the attorney-client privilege. This concerted attack by the ABA, I assert, had little to do with presenting evidence that the government was eroding the attorney-client privilege, and everything to do with protecting the interests of their institutional clients and themselves. Section V offers a brief conclusion. I have also included an Appendix offering a timeline of the events discussed in this paper.

Over more than a decade, specialist Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) schools or classes for children with autism have developed in the UK and Ireland. However, very little is known internationally about how ABA is defined in practice in school settings, the characteristics of children supported in ABA school settings, and the staffing structures used. To answer these questions, the focus of the present research was a nationwide census of ABA schools throughout the UK. As far as it was possible to ascertain, we achieved a 100% return rate. There were 14 ABA schools and classes throughout the UK, supporting 258 children with autism, and employing 382 staff that supported ABA teaching. The mean ratio for ABA staff to children was 1.4 staff members: 1 child (range 0.7:1–2:1). The majority of all staff members were graduates or had a higher academic qualification (67.7%). This census methodology, if repeated, may help to identify future trends and can provide a baseline for developments in ABA schools/classes in the UK.► A census of ABA schools/classes throughout the UK was conducted. ► 100% of identified schools/classes participated. ► 258 children and young people attended ABA schools. ► 382 staff members support ABA teaching. ► The census may help identify future trends in ABA schools/classes.