NMCC Moot Court Team Goes to Nationals

Please congratulate third-year law students Lauren Brasington and Carsyn Bushman for their success at the final rounds of the National Moot Court Competition (NMCC), co-hosted by the American College of Trial Lawyers and the New York City Bar Association and held virtually this year. The team was capably coached by Attorneys Kieran O’Day and Evan Thomsen.

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The Last Bastion

The United States, like most democracies, takes pride in being governed by the “rule of law”; it aspires to be what John Adams once called “a government of laws and not of men.” There’s a sense, in this imagery, that law is something distinct from human beings; that it’s a sort of machine, that operates autonomously to generate answers to legal questions.

Of course, as the legal realists recognized, that’s all transcendental nonsense. Laws do not apply themselves, they are written and interpreted and applied by human beings. But a rule of laws that is subject to the whims of individual decisionmakers is no rule at all. Believing in the rule of law requires a sort of leap of faith. It requires a form of trust that other actors in the system, even ordinary citizens, will generally coalesce around the same outcomes and interpretations.

And that sort of trust — any sort of trust in institutions, including law — is breaking down. Faith in courts to provide the law, and faith in lawyers to be able to say what the law is, will fade with it. And after that, in the words of Felix Frankfurter: “first chaos, then tyranny.”

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Institute for Women’s Leadership Releases Report on Law Firm Equity Initiative

As part of Women’s History Month, the Marquette University Institute for Women’s Leadership released its first white paper, entitled Law Firm Equity Initiative, examining the status of women in the Milwaukee legal market.  (This survey went out to all firms with over 10 attorneys in the metro area—more on methodology in the report itself.)  I am honored to be the author of this report knowing that transparency is step one in bringing about any change.

My motivation for doing this study came from watching the remarkable progress that companies in Wisconsin have made in the last few years in terms of placing women on their boards. Inspired by what transparency and peer pressure has accomplished in the corporate world, I hope that we can hold a mirror to our legal community and also ask what we can do better.

When I graduated law school (don’t ask—it was a long time ago) and did not see women in leadership roles, I was told it was a pipeline issue—just give it time and women would ascend to the heights of leadership once there were equal number of women graduating.  So, has that story played out?  Not so much.

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