Dec

30

Congratulations to the 2012 Jenkins Competitors

Posted by: | December 30, 2011 | 1 Comment

The Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition is an appellate moot court competition for Marquette law students. Students are invited to participate based on their performance in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy course at the Law School. Congratulations to the participants in the 2012 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition:  Joseph Birdsall Bailey Briggs Clayton Britnell [...]

Dec

29

Felony Prosecutions Are Cheap

Posted by: | December 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest data from its periodic national surveys of prosecutors’ offices.  The report contains a lot of interesting information (albeit perhaps a bit dated — the survey was from 2007). The number that struck me the most was $2,792 — what BJS reported as the average cost [...]

Dec

29

A Good Year for Marquette, But Not So Good for Legal Education

Posted by: | December 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment

With the completion of the first full calendar year in Eckstein Hall, the establishment of the Law School as a premier center for public policy debates in Wisconsin, and the announcement of the Marquette Law School Poll, 2011 was a banner year for the Marquette Law School. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for legal [...]

Dec

27

A Visit From the Ghost of Jury Service Past

Posted by: | December 27, 2011 | Leave a Comment

What do you remember about November 29, 1995? That was the day when one of the jurors in Jesse Webster’s drug trafficking trial was out sick. The next day, with all twelve jurors again present, Webster was convicted. Many years later, Webster claimed in a petition for post-conviction relief that the eleven jurors who showed [...]

Dec

24

Before the Sports Broadcasting Act: Professional Football Fifty Years Ago

Posted by: | December 24, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Warning:  This essay contains pure, unadulterated nostalgia for the professional sports regime of the middle third of 20th century America. I remember watching the 1960 World Series on television, but the first year that I really followed major league baseball was 1961, the year of Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle’s historic assault on Babe Ruth’s [...]

Dec

22

Holiday Reading List

Posted by: | December 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

Exams are over, and we have a few weeks before classes resume. I belong to a book club, and we recently voted in our books for the following year. I’m planning to get a head start on some of those books over the holidays. Here are the books at the top of my current reading [...]

Dec

21

Negotiating Trick Shots

Posted by: | December 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

A little holiday cheer while grading exams–here’s how (yet another) failed negotiation went in my house this past fall. For context, my son Noah broke his leg on the very first day of school, 10 minutes into the very first soccer practice of the year. Since he couldn’t move much, his friends have been over [...]

Dec

20

A Tale of Three States, Part 5: The Effect of Truth in Sentencing in Wisconsin

Posted by: | December 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Previous posts in this series have examined the latest available incarceration data from Indiana, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. This post considers historical data. I’m particularly interested in the impact of a major change in sentencing law that was adopted in Wisconsin in 1998. Under the “truth in sentencing” law, parole was abolished for crimes committed on [...]

Dec

18

SUVs and the Security State

Posted by: | December 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

Some thought higher gas prices would once and for all end the popularity of SUVs, but the demand for SUVs remained high during 2011. Sales totals for Ford’s Explorer and the Chrysler Groups’ Grand Cherokee, to cite only two SUV models, were higher than in 2010. How might one explain the continuing popularity of these [...]

Dec

16

New Database Creates Time-Series Plots of Phrases in U.S. Supreme Court Opinions

Posted by: | December 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment

Emory and Michigan State Law Schools have teamed up to create a free database that allows you to search for a term or phrase in U.S. Supreme Court opinions (1791-2005) and automatically generate a time-series frequency chart of the phrase’s appearance.

Dec

16

Intent and the Eighth Amendment: New Restrictions on Sentencing in Cases of Felony Murder?

Posted by: | December 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment

The felony-murder rule is perhaps the most troubling and controversial surviving relic of the common law of homicide, branding felons as murderers notwithstanding an absence of the sort of culpability otherwise required for a murder conviction. If we are not going to make culpability-based distinctions in these cases at the guilt stage, then we ought to [...]

Dec

16

3,000 Billable Hour Requirement – Believable?

Posted by: | December 16, 2011 | 2 Comments

Did everyone happen to see this article in the ABA Journal? If you missed it, an attorney who had been fired is now suing his former law firm because the firm’s alleged requirement that attorneys bill 3,000 hours per year encouraged fraud. There are so many great conversations/debates that could be started by this lawsuit: [...]

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