I’m honored to reintroduce myself to the Marquette Law School community, beyond Dean Kearney’s beginning-of-year letter. In my new (if returning) role as an adjunct faculty member, I look forward to sharing what I’ve learned from a long career working in the criminal justice system and pursuing the wise reforms it needs.

I have spent my professional career in Wisconsin, first as a staff lawyer in the State Public Defender’s office in Milwaukee and then, starting in 2000, as its Regional Attorney Manager, leading the SPD’s Milwaukee trial office. Yet almost as important to me was the opportunity offered to me in 1997 to teach the Public Defender Clinic as an adjunct professor at Marquette Law School. I was welcomed into the Marquette community and have felt close to its mission ever since. More about that in a minute, after some further background.

Having grown up in Connecticut, I entered Northwestern University as an undergraduate with a deep, if unfocused, interest in history, literature, philosophy, and related topics. I spent four amazing years becoming grounded in what one writer famously described as “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” I will forever be grateful for the professors at Northwestern and many others, including my parents, who made that possible. I learned a few things.

Lesson one: Spend time reading important and challenging writers. It will make you a better person and a much better lawyer. You will never have “enough time” for this reading, but do it anyway.

I graduated from Cornell Law School, where I found my place in the law in my second and, especially, third years, when I was able to take seminar courses that started to build a bridge from my continuing interest in history, literature, philosophy to what I was studying in law school.

Lesson two: Legal rules regulate our conduct in many important areas of life. To understand how they work, one must have a broad and deep interest in how people live their lives. Being a technician in the law is not sufficiently enriching; but breathing deeply into the complexities of life, as they appear in cases and with clients, is where the real learning occurs. Learning across disciplines is an essential skill.

It was not a surprise that an opportunity to work as a public defender was highly appealing to me, given what I have described. Looking back on my start as a public defender in 1982, however, I recognize how little I really understood about the lives of the clients I served, the realities of policing in Milwaukee and other American cities, and the struggle it is to really achieve the justice enshrined in our most powerful constitutional principles and decided cases. I spent a long career learning every day in order to do my best work for clients, and then for every lawyer working on behalf of SPD clients.

Lesson three: We never have a just society. But we have the opportunity to do justice every day. And it is hard work. Living in a just society is one of the highest accomplishments possible. We should not be discouraged by the challenges of achieving it. As human beings we struggle to make sense of so many things that the law touches. Resolving conflicts and planning for the future lie at the heart of the work. Justice is an emergent quality, and it comes from our best efforts.

Being the Regional Attorney Manager for the State Public Defender in Milwaukee was an enormous privilege. Once again, looking back, I recognize how much I didn’t know as I took on a leadership role at this level. But here, Marquette Law School played an important role, as it built out the programming that we now take for granted at the Lubar Center. Scholars and leaders in the law and politics regularly appeared and offered perspectives which I thought about every day and still do. It is often said that hurt people hurt people. Are there partial solutions? When Robert Sampson came to Marquette Law School in 2015 to describe the enormous power of neighborhoods based on his research in Chicago, or Mathew Desmond then came for the launch of his book, Evicted, sharing the results of his research in Milwaukee, or Patrick Sharkey came to discuss how crime reductions could be tied in data to the web of organizations lifting people out of poverty, it was clear that powerful ideas were being developed. Crime, especially violence, is not inevitable, and its causes can be addressed more effectively than just using penal strategies.

Lesson four: Make friends with powerful voices outside the law.

I have always been an enthusiast for the lawyers, investigators, social workers, and clerical staff who work for the SPD in Milwaukee. These are people who wake up every day trying to stand with people accused of crime. I know how much these staff feel that we can and should do better for the clients they represent: first, to help them recover from their own trauma and to prevent unnecessary harm to others, and secondarily, to temper our desire for accountability so that people who can contribute to our society are given that chance. In my role at the SPD, we worked hard to support efforts to help clients facing addiction, mental illness, and other problems. Treatment courts, diversion programs, and the like were important examples of this commitment. Skilled defense attorneys are essential to help clients work through those “alternatives” to incarceration.

Lesson five: We must never give up on people. People who do harm to others can be assisted to learn from their experiences if we have the patience and skill to help them. Marquette Law School’s leadership in restorative justice is an obvious example of how this is possible.

This is the experience and perspective I bring to my new presence at the Law School. I have shared much of this experience with two of the Marquette faculty: Mary Triggiano, clinical professor of law and director of the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, and John Chisholm, senior lecturer, and with Dean Kearney, as well as with other leaders in Milwaukee. The experience teaches how to imagine using existing legal approaches to strengthen and prevent much of the conduct that causes harm. Many of us worked hard to find ways to build an evidence-based foundation for a modern criminal justice system and were aided by national foundations, scholars, and other leaders. One can look at the City of Milwaukee’s Blueprint for Peace for language that captures the vision involved.

I intend to be available at the Law School to anyone who would like to discuss what it means to work for justice reform or, in practical terms, how to learn to be a courtroom advocate. I expect to share my experiences when it would be helpful with classes underway and other law school gatherings. As an adjunct faculty member with years of experience teaching the Public Defender Clinic, I am also happy to talk to anyone about that program when it comes time to register for the third year. Finally, I expect to teach from time to time, and I look forward to the deeper engagement that a class provides.

I look forward to all of this.