“Whatever its benefits, professional advertising does not seem to have ushered in an age of cheap doctors, cheap lawyers, or even cheap accountants,” writes Michael Davis in “Perspectives on the Professions” (Spring), newsletter of IIT’s Center for the Study of Ethics in the Professions. “If the professions used to be conspiracies in restraint of trade”–as stated in key 1975 and 1978 Supreme Court cases–“they do not, on the evidence, seem to have been very effective conspiracies.”
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Boss with no Royko. “Daley the Son has once again moved a nearly $5 billion city budget through the Council by a unanimous vote, a feat even his supposedly omnipotent father never accomplished,” writes Robert Davis in Illinois Issues (June). “The Lakefront Liberal bloc has faded, and those wards are now represented by sure-thing [pro-Daley] votes, as are the increasing number of black and Hispanic wards.”
The story of Spunky Bottoms. “In October 1997, the Illinois chapter [of the Nature Conservancy] bought 1,157 acres of farmland on the western bank of the [Illinois] river near Meredosia,” writes Paul Clancy in Nature Conservancy (July/August). River water was allowed to gradually rise in the bottomland, and “the long-dormant seeds of buried prairie wetlands burst into life. Wild millet, cattails, water lilies, rushes and sedges appeared. Almost immediately, waterfowl began returning in impressive numbers…. ‘We’ve spent so much time talking about this stuff, to see it recover like that was just wonderful,’ says Michael Reuter, the Conservancy’s state director of conservation programs. ‘It’s given me a sense of the resilience of the land and what it’s capable of doing if given half a chance.’”
