Apr
3
Victim/Offender Mediation in Turkey
Posted by: Janine P. Geske | April 3, 2012 | 4 Comments
After a delegation of members of the Turkish Parliament visited Marquette Law School last month, I had the privilege of traveling to Istanbul to moderate a victim/offender mediation conference for two hundred fifty Turkish prosecutors and judges. There were fourteen of us restorative justice “experts” from ten different countries who were there for three days [...]
Mar
25
Signing a Recall Petition Does Not Require Judicial Recusal
Posted by: Edward A. Fallone | March 25, 2012 | 12 Comments
We live in interesting times. A segment of the general public is quick to forgive the killing of two young men in Slinger, Wisconsin and Sanford, Florida as the unavoidable consequence of the exercise of a constitutional right. Yet at the same time, state court judges who have exercised their constitutional right of self-governance by signing [...]
Mar
9
Supreme Court Justices Today Are Unlikely to Die with Their Boots On
Posted by: J. Gordon Hylton | March 9, 2012 | 1 Comment
Since 1789, 102 men and one woman have left the United States Supreme Court after varying periods of service. Forty-seven of the 103 died while still on the Court, while the other 56 retired. Dying in office was once a much more frequent occurrence than it has been in the modern era. Of the 57 [...]
Feb
3
The Court of Appeals Speaks in the Recall Case
Posted by: Edward A. Fallone | February 3, 2012 | 10 Comments
Today, the District IV Court of Appeals issued an opinion that reverses a ruling by the Waukesha County Circuit Court denying a motion to intervene in the case of Friends of Scott Walker v. Brennan. The practical impact of today’s Court of Appeals decision is that the committees seeking the recall of Governor Walker and other [...]
Jan
30
Collecting Judges, Past and Present
Posted by: Joseph D. Kearney | January 30, 2012 | 1 Comment
Tom Shriner’s recent remembrance of Judge Dale Ihlenfeldt said to law students and new lawyers that “you can—must—learn the lessons of the law (and life) from everyone, not just your professors, but your colleagues, your adversaries, your clients, and even from judges.” This last (neatly phrased) is the case, in my estimation, both of judges [...]
Jan
16
John Paul Stevens’ Restraint
Posted by: Gabriel Houghton | January 16, 2012 | 1 Comment
After he retired in 2010, John Paul Stevens published Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir. After a brief description of the first twelve Chief Justices of the United States Supreme Court, from John Jay through Harlan Fiske Stone, he describes in more detail the last five with whom he was professionally acquainted. Stevens clerked for [...]
Jan
7
Poetry in the Law
Posted by: Gabriel Houghton | January 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment
Shortly before Christmas, I came across a notice that Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin had written an opinion in verse. In Commonwealth v. Goodson, the court overturned the defendant’s conviction for insurance fraud in an opinion penned entirely in heterometric sexains. Some of the lines are clunky, the rhymes forced: “And thus the matter [...]
Jan
5
Friends of Scott Walker v. GAB Changes the Recall Rules Mid-Stream
Posted by: Edward A. Fallone | January 5, 2012 | 9 Comments
Today, Judge J. Mac Davis ruled that the Government Accountability Board must take “affirmative steps to identify and strike duplicate, fictitious or unrecognizable signatures as it reviews the recall petitions expected to be filed against Gov. Scott Walker.” The ruling comes in the case of Friends of Scott Walker v. GAB, filed in Waukesha County [...]
Dec
7
Learned Hand on the Politics of Judicial Appointments
Posted by: Ryan Scoville | December 7, 2011 | 2 Comments
In debates over potential reforms to the judicial appointments process, there seems to be a pervasive sense that the problem of politicization is a relatively new one. In terms of the frequency with which the Senate rejects even highly qualified nominees and the extent to which overt partisanship has crept into the evaluation of candidates [...]
Nov
29
No Harm, No Foul — But How Do You Know If There Was Harm?
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | November 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case that gives the Court an opportunity to clarify a longstanding ambiguity in harmless error law. Even if a defendant’s procedural rights have been violated at trial, a conviction will not be reversed on appeal if the error was harmless. However, the Court has at different [...]
Nov
29
A.B.A. Rejections of Obama Judicial Nominees
Posted by: David R. Papke | November 29, 2011 | Leave a Comment
Speaking through its judicial vetting committee, the A.B.A. has rejected fourteen of President Obama’s potential nominees for the federal bench. The overall rejection rate was 7.5 percent, a rate three and a half times that for the eight-year administrations of both President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton. Why has the A.B.A. been less [...]
Sep
26
Generalist Versus Specialist Judges
Posted by: Michael M. O'Hear | September 26, 2011 | 1 Comment
The Federal Circuit and a few other counterexamples notwithstanding, American courts are not substantively specialized. By and large, the American judge is thus a generalist. For better or worse, our judiciary seems to be holding out against the pressures toward specialization that have so marked the contemporary legal and medical professions. Is this a good [...]
Blog Editors
- Alan Borsuk
- Bruce E. Boyden
- Edward A. Fallone
- Melissa L. Greipp
- Scott C. Idleman
- Lisa Mazzie
- Michael M. O'Hear
- Ryan Scoville
