Seán O'Brien

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. The golden jackal of Africa has long been considered a conspecific of jackals distributed throughout Eurasia, with the nearest source populations in the Middle East. However, two recent reports found that mitochondrial haplotypes of some African golden jackals aligned more closely to gray wolves [1, 2], which is surprising giventhe absence of gray wolves in Africa and the phenotypic divergence between the two species. Moreover, these results imply the existence of a previously unrecognized phylogenetically distinct species despite a long history of taxonomic work on African canids. To test the distinct-species hypothesis and understand the evolutionary history that would account for this puzzling result, we analyzed extensive genomic data including mitochondrial genome sequences, sequences from 20 autosomal loci, microsatellite loci, X- and Y-linked zinc-finger protein gene sequences, and whole-genome nuclear sequences in African and Eurasian golden jackals and gray wolves. Our results provide consistent and robust evidence that populations of golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia represent distinct monophyletic lineages separated for more than onemillion years, sufficient to merit formal recognition as different species: C.anthus and C.aureus. Usingmorphologic data, we demonstrate a striking morphologic similarity between East African and Eurasian golden jackals, suggesting parallelism, which may have misled taxonomists and likely reflects uniquely intense interspecific competition in the East African carnivore guild. Our study shows how ecology can confound taxonomy if interspecific competition constrains size diversification. Koepfli etal. assess divergence between golden jackals from Africa and Eurasia using data from the mitochondrial and nuclear genomes. They show that African and Eurasian golden jackals are genetically distinct and independent lineages, and that African golden jackals likely represent a separate species.

Critical Legal Studies is a heterogeneous body of legal theory that borrows from a number of traditions in developing a critique of the liberal legal tradition. CLS is a strain of "anti-necessetarian" thought in that it depicts law as fraught with indeterminancy on a number of a levels. The question this work explores is whether CLS can get beyond the anti-necessetarian critique of the liberal tradition to argue for a positive program of their own. ;This work identifies and evaluates certain features of CLS's position that could potentially hinder the development of a normative critical legal theory. Included in this discussion is an evaluation of Stanley Fish's criticism of CLS. Fish denies access to the "interpretive constructs" which are a focal point of CLS's analysis. Also included is a discussion of whether or not CLS's epistemological commitments might prevent them from coming up with a positive program of their own. Finally, this work questions the possibility of CLS getting beyond a sophisticated Marxist analysis of law

The Supplementary Guidelines for the Mitigation Function of Capital Defense Teams are the culmination of three years of work coordinated by the Public Interest Litigation Clinic (PILC) and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law in cooperation with seasoned capital litigators and mitigation specialists across the United States. This article describes the Supplementary Guidelines and the process by which they were researched and developed. Part I describes the Supplementary Guidelines and the process by which they were researched and developed. Part II describes the reasons for undertaking this project. Part III describes the process of investigating, researching and drafting the the Supplementary Guidelines. Part IV identifies the scope and goals of the Supplementary Guidelines and identifies some of the issues that guided our efforts. Part V analyzes the concept of mitigation and its constitutional and practical role in the sentencing process. Part VI explains the central role of the life history investigation in the development of a mitigation case. Part VII discusses the skills and abilities that are essential to the constitutionally effective performance of the mitigation function of capital defense teams. Finally, Part VIII explains the need for for capital jurisdictions to provide adequate funding to fully staff capital defense teams.