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CYBERCASE Stanford Law School and judges from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California are experimenting with a system of trial by Internet that may help streamline the costly, labor-intensive litigation process by allowing motions to be filed, reviewed and argued on a secure website, without attorneys or judges ever having to see each other or spend time and money preparing for oral arguments. "This would be a major change in the way cases are litigated," said David Balabanian, a partner at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown and Enersen, who first expressed the idea in a memorandum after discussions with U.S. Magistrate Judge Edward Infante and Stanford Law School Professor Joseph A. Grundfest, both of whom are involved in the project. STANFORD'S HIGHWIRE ACT Stanford University Libraries, along with five leading scientific publishers, has launched the HighWire Marketing Group to promote and distribute a range of scholarly journals featuring online prices lower than many print prices. HighWire has distribution arrangements with some of the leading scholarly publishers in the scientific and technical fields, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Rockefeller University Press.
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GOULD BACK ON THE FARM National Labor Rela-tions Board Chairman William B. Gould IV resigned his post in President Clinton's administration before his term ended in August and returned to his professorship at Stanford Law School this fall. In a letter to the president, Gould, who assumed the post in 1994, pointed to the "considerable strides" he had made in labor conflict resolution. He listed restoring "the Board's credibility as an impartial arbiter of labor-management disputes'' among his accomplishments. The fact that he has critics on both sides suggests that he had some success in doing so. He also credited the board with reducing wasteful litigation and criticized Congress for meddling in the board's affairs. Gould, who has authored six books, is planning to write a new one on his experience in Washington and another one based on the diaries of his great-grandfather, an escaped slave who served for three years in the Navy during the Civil War.
A CAMPUS "SIDFEST" Sidney Drell once wrote that his life has been "divided between pursuing the dream of discovery and working to avoid the nightmare of a nuclear holocaust." During his 49-year career, he has made major contributions in both areas. Now, at 71, Drell, a prominent physicist and arms control specialist, is retiring from his position as professor and deputy of SLAC. His discoveries on the structure of protons led to the discovery of quarks, now considered to be the basic building blocks of protons and neutrons. He was also one of the early few proponents of the quantum field theory that was the basis for what now is called the Standard Model to describe all the basic particles and forces in nature, except for gravity. Since the early 1960s Drell has been a member of the cadre of scientists that advises the U.S. government on technical and highly classified issues regarding national security and defense. More than 200 top physicists from around the country and the world came to Stanford on July 31 to attend a special symposium in Drell's honor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
