Products Liability Moot Court Team Wins Best Petitioner Brief and Advances to Semifinals

Please join me in congratulating Jon Fritz and Dale Johnson, who represented Marquette at the August A. Rendigs, Jr. National Products Liability Moot Court Competition this weekend.  Jon and Dale not only advanced to the semi-final round of the competition, they also received an award for writing the best brief on behalf of the petitioner.

Jon, Dale, and I would like to thank the many people who helped the team prepare for the competition.   Specifically, we would like to thank Marquette lawyers Jane Appleby and Sean Finnigan, 3L Maura Battersby, and Professors Rebecca Blemberg, Patricia Bradford, Rick Esenberg, Melissa Greipp, Nadelle Grossman, Lisa Hatlen, Jill Hayford, Jack Kircher, Julie Norton, Chad Oldfather, Elana Olson, and Andrea Schneider for their help in judging the practice arguments.

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Sting Operation on a Child Witness

An online dictionary defines a sting operation as “a complicated confidence game planned and executed with great care (especially an operation implemented by undercover agents to apprehend criminals).” In law-enforcement contexts, covert investigation tactics are essential to obtaining evidence of criminal conduct committed by participants in sophisticated criminal enterprises. Evidence of common street crimes such as drug dealing and prostitution is often gathered with sting operations as well. Lawyers sometimes advise or supervise these activities to assure compliance with the law and admissibility of any evidence that is gathered.

Compare this with the sting operation carried out by a Madison, Wisconsin, criminal defense lawyer against the fifteen-year-old who accused his client of repeated sexual assaults beginning when the boy was nine years old.

The lawyer believed that the boy was lying and thought that the boy’s computer might contain evidence of the child’s independent interest in child pornography. The lawyer was concerned that the police investigator would not objectively seek and examine such evidence and that the boy might destroy evidence on his computer if given any warning.

The lawyer decided to retain a private investigator to trick the child and his mother into surrendering the boy’s computer and any evidence it might contain.

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Virtual Book Club: Tribe on the Invisible Constitution

As announced earlier this semester, several faculty members have been reading Laurence Tribe’s The Invisible Constitution.  I hope that we will be having a series of posts and comments on the book.  I have just finished reading it.  A few very general reactions will be offered here.

Tribe’s interest is in a set of principles that have come to be accepted as constitutional in nature, but that appear nowhere in the Constitution’s written text.  He lists as examples:

  • Courts must not automatically defer to what elected officials decide the Constitution means.
  • Government may not torture people to force information out of them.
  • In each person’s intimate private life, there are limits to what government may control.
  • Congress may not commandeer the states as though they were agencies or departments of the federal government.
  • No state may secede from the Union.  (28)

In developing his thesis that the Constitution contains such invisible “dark matter,” Tribe implicitly situates himself in opposition to the formalist school of constitutional interpretation, which emphasizes the written text of the Constitution and historical documents from the framing era that shed light on the meaning of the text.  Tribe instead understands the content of the Constitution to evolve over time, even without formal amendment of the text. 

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