Seán O'Brien

The recent interest in wisdom in professional health care practice is explored in this article. Key features of wisdom are identified via consideration of certain classical, ancient and modern sources. Common themes are discussed in terms of their contribution to ‘clinical wisdom’ itself and this is reviewed against the nature of contemporary nursing education. The distinctive features of wisdom (recognition of contextual factors, the place of the person and timeliness) may enable their significance for practice to be promoted in more coherent ways in nursing education. Wisdom as practical knowledge (phronesis) is offered as a complementary perspective within the educational preparation and practice of students of nursing. Certain limitations within contemporary UK nursing education are identified that may inhibit development of clinical wisdom. These are: the modularization of programmes in higher education institutions, the division of pastoral and academic support and the relationship between theory and practice

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.

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