Remember That Time Our State Was Selected to Host Nationals . . . .

Some kids play football in high school.  Some play basketball.  Some participate in cheerleading or dance.  Then, there are those of us who were proud to call ourselves “mock trial nerds.” At my high school, we practiced more than the sports teams.  We had a “Varsity” and a “JV.” We competed in scrimmages against other teams, and we had coaches.  We won our regional tournament every year, and we advanced to State.  Our school held a pep rally for us every year before State. Our parents came to watch (or in my case, coach) our team.  We dealt with high school drama during the year, had our highs and lows, but we worked incredibly hard, pulled ourselves together, and always walked into the courtroom a united front.  While not around when I was in school, today there are actually numerous mock trial summer camps throughout the country.  I’ve even heard rumors of mock trial scholarships to college.

Much of my life has involved mock trial. 

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The Value of Trial Experience to a Young Lawyer

As a new lawyer, I struggled to come up with blog topics. Being only two years out of law school, I don’t pretend to have near the amount of knowledge or experience as the frequent contributors and readers of this blog. I contemplated a post about the recent United States Supreme Court decision in Missouri v. McNeely, but Dean O’Hear would cover that topic in a much more eloquent and researched fashion. I then contemplated a post about the privacy implications regarding the recent news on the NSA collecting phone records (or even more recently—the criminal defendants demanding the records as exculpatory evidence). However, as a past student of Professor Boyden’s Law of Privacy class, I’m inclined to believe his post on that issue would make a much more interesting read. I finally decided on a topic that has monopolized my attention this Spring and Summer: jury trials. While a post on jury trials authored by Professor Blinka would likely be deemed so sage as to be cited by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, I’ll tackle the area from what I’ve learned as a new lawyer.

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