May

31

Anyone Interested in a Faculty Blog T-Shirt?

Posted by: | May 31, 2010 | 2 Comments

Look around your home and you are sure to find no shortage of cheap promotional items carrying the logo of one business or another.  In fact, I happen to have in front of me right now three pens emblazoned with the names of three different national hotel chains.  None of the hotel chains are especially trendy, so it [...]

May

31

The Reporter’s Privilege Goes Incognito in Wisconsin

Posted by: | May 31, 2010 | 1 Comment

Few professional groups in our society are less popular than journalists, so it’s a rare occasion when legislators – obsessed as they are with reelection – take actions specifically designed to help the press. The Wisconsin Legislature showed some of that political bravery this month when it passed the state’s first reporter’s shield law (although [...]

May

27

A Captivating New Paper

Posted by: | May 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Paul Secunda argues in a new paper on SSRN that the National Labor Relations Act should be interpreted to prohibit “captive audience meetings.”  Employers require employee attendance at such meetings in order to communicate anti-union messages.  Paul has written interestingly about captive audience meetings from a number of perspectives (see, e.g., here).  In the new paper, he critically [...]

May

27

The Second Amendment and the Public’s Health

Posted by: | May 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Last November, Michael O’Hear offered an interesting post on whether a Seventh Circuit decision that developed a new test for Second Amendment claims would breath life into the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008), which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment as conferring an individual [...]

May

26

Television’s First Public Prosecutor

Posted by: | May 26, 2010 | 2 Comments

My colleague David Papke recently posted on “Law and Order and the Rise of the Pop Culture Prosecutor.”  David noted that unlike most lawyer television shows of the past, the long-running series focused on prosecutors rather than defense lawyers. While it is certainly true that most television and motion picture lawyers have been defense attorneys rather [...]

May

26

Kopp Offers Hope in Commencement Speech for Better Education Results in Milwaukee

Posted by: | May 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment

In May 2009, Kalyn Gigot was sitting in the audience at Marquette University’s commencement ceremony as a no-doubt proud graduate. But it was a year later, at Marquette’s commencement Sunday, when Gigot was individually singled out for attention and praise in the graduation address. What did she do in between? She joined Teach for America, [...]

May

26

Playing with Fire and an Obama Effigy

Posted by: | May 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment

People do imbecilic things when alcohol enters the mix.  It is a fact of life.  On one end of the spectrum, drunkenness promotes relatively harmless buffoonery, whether it is singing along to “Sweet Caroline” completely out of tune at the bars on Water Street or repeatedly professing one’s love for his or her friends and [...]

May

25

Law & Order and the Rise of the Pop Cultural Prosecutor

Posted by: | May 25, 2010 | 7 Comments

Years before Law & Order ended its incredible twenty-year run on May 24, 2010, the series had staked its claim to being the longest-running primetime series featuring lawyer characters. In addition, the series included an important change in how the heroic pop cultural lawyer is represented. In earlier lawyer shows with especially lengthy runs, such [...]

May

24

ERISA Supreme Court Attorney Fees Case Goes Way of Plaintiffs

Posted by: | May 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment

For those who care about ERISA participants and beneficiaries being able to find good counsel for their claims, the U.S. Supreme Court decision this morning in Hardt v. Reliance Insurance Co., No. 09-448 (U.S. May 24, 2010) is welcome news. In a nearly unanimous opinion written by Justice Thomas (Justice Stevens wrote to concur in [...]

May

24

Can Google-TV Help Liberate Cable-TV?

Posted by: | May 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Tech nerds and media junkies have been buzzing lately about Google’s announcement that it will soon rollout Google-TV — a new device/platform that will turn people’s televisions into portals for online video and other web content. Google representatives unveiled the project last week at a developers conference where they staged a Steve Jobs-like showcase that [...]

May

23

Marquette Sports Law Abroad

Posted by: | May 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

Last month I had the opportunity to participate in a sports law conference in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.  This event–styled Arab Lex Sportiva–was billed as the first ever sports law conference in the Arab world, and it was held in the conference center where the 1994 Israeli-Jordanian peace accords were signed. It was fascinating to [...]

May

23

The Unsolved Mysteries of “Unsolved Mysteries”

Posted by: | May 23, 2010 | 3 Comments

(Part 2 of 2) I fully expect that we will get some resolution to several important plot threads in Lost’s finale tonight, particularly matters that have been developed over the last season and Season 5′s finale: what “sideways world” is, what Desmond is up to, how MIB is going to be defeated, what happens to [...]

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