There is growing interest within the investment community in what are known as “index” or “market” funds. These are mutual or other investment funds that have abandoned the traditional attempt to “beat the market” by picking and choosing among securities-buying stocks or bonds that they believe to be undervalued and selling those they believe to be overvalued. Instead, they create and hold essentially unchanged a portfolio of securities that is designed to approximate some index of market performance such as the Standard & Poor's 500. The S&P 500 is a hypothetical portfolio consisting of 500 major nonfinancial companies on the New York Stock Exchange weighted by the market value of each company's total outstanding shares. Batterymarch Financial Management Corporation in its Market Portfolio holds a 250-stock selection from the S&P 500 designed to track the performance of the S&P 500 very closely. Two major banks, American National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago and Wells Fargo Bank, have created market funds in their trust departments. And several large pension funds, including those of several Bell Telephone Companies and of Exxon, have recently placed a portion of their assets in such funds.

To own one's own home has long been at the heart of the American dream. Despite the considerable recent attention to new and nontraditional modes of living–in planned communities, town houses, communes, condominiums, and cooperatives–and although some social reformers and intellectuals have criticized conventional modes of living, owning a home and “cooking hamburgers over a charcoal fire” remain a dominant part of the middle class ethos.

Medical malpractice, a subject that once languished in comparative obscurity, has in recent years become one of the most hotly debated topics of our time. The reasons for its surge to prominence, not only in medical and legal circles but also in the public eye, are not difficult to detect. Vast increases, slow at first but more rapid of late, have been evident in the number of medical malpractice actions; in the number of actions in which the plaintiffs have recovered; in the average size of their recovery; and, as a consequence, in the cost of medical malpractice insurance. In and of itself the unmistakable trend in the figures need not be a source of public concern. We could simply wash our hands of the whole affair and indulge in the happy assumption that the matter eventually will sort itself out in the marketplace. The cost of malpractice awards could be treated as just another cost of providing medical care that will, in the long run at least, be passed on to either taxpayer or consumer.

This is a study of the voir dire proceedings in the trial of the United States v. John Mitchell and Maurice Stans in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the spring of 1974 (docket no. 73 Cr. 439). The major charge was conspiracy to impede a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Robert L. Vesco, a financier, a fugitive at the time of the trial, in return for a $200,000 cash contribution to President Nixon's reelection campaign.

Computerized document retrieval systems are now a commercial reality; they enable attorneys and other researchers to search quickly through large collections of judicial decisions and statutes for those containing words pertinent to their inquiries. While these systems can free the researcher from the constraints of formal indexing, they leave him enslaved to a different master-word usage in the documents through which he is searching With these new systems, the retrievability of a document is determined by its word content, and that in turn is determined by the vocabulary and stylistic habits of the document's author. Thus, judges and other document authors unwittingly serve as the indexers of these systems.

In 1972 all but 11 of the 149 law schools approved by the American Bar Association published law reviews. Some schools published more than one. Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago Law School each produced four. Most state bar associations and some local and specialty associations also publish journals, some of which print scholarly articles. A number of legal periodicals are issued by commercial publishers. The Index to Legal Periodicals, the most prominent access tool to periodical legal literature, indexed 285 American legal periodicals and serials in 1972.

Anyone interested in the current doings of the antibiotics antitrust litigation in the spring of 1975l could easily have found seating in the public section of the courtroom of Judge Miles A. Lord in Minneapolis. An instantly striking aspect of the courtroom was that, in contrast to the scattering of young attorneys and an occasional curious onlooker in the public section, there were dozens of people crowded into the area around the central raised bench on which Judge Lord sits. Several attorneys represenr: the defendants-five of the major drug manufacturing companies in the United States. Numerous counsel for the plaintiffs were grouped around a large table to Judge Lord's right. Clerks, court reporters, and marshals sat beneath the bench. The most remarkable feature of the crowd, however, was the presence of two jury boxes containing two separate juries. In fact, two different trials in six different cases were proceeding at once. “Jury One” was hearing evidence in actions brought by the United States, two national classes (one of insurance companies and the other of union health and welfare funds), and a California medical group. “Jury TWQ” was hearing evidence in suits brought in behalf of competitors of the defendant drug companies. For the most part, the juries were hearing evidence common to both sets of cases. When evidence was introduced that was relevant to only one set of cases, the other jvry would be excused.