Alan J. Borsuk – Page 128 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Asking the Right Questions About Justifying War

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:January 26, 2010
Post category:Human Rights International Law & Diplomacy Religion & Law Speakers at Marquette

If you think of “just war” theory as something associated with pacifism or as a path for justifying not using military tactics in many world situations, you’re looking at the subject from the wrong perspective, Catholic commentator George Weigel said Tuesday in a talk at Marquette Law School.

You’re looking at it the way President Barack Obama does – which is “almost entirely inside out and upside down,” Weigel said in a lecture sponsored by the student chapters of the Federalist Society and St. Thomas More Society.

Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., is author of a widely read biography of Pope John Paul II and other books and a commentator on NBC on Catholic news.

He gave Obama credit for using Nobel Peace Prize speech recently to discuss the need to go to war against evil that exists in the world, but he said the underpinning of Obama’s justification of war was built too heavily on factors that were of lower priority than the main pillars of the subject in thought going back to St. Augustine.

One-Upping Beyonce

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:January 20, 2010
Post category:Milwaukee Public Schools

Beyonce Here are a few moments of upbeat hopefulness for those (count me in) who find keeping an eye on Milwaukee’s education scene to be pretty somber going much of the time.

There are three Hope Lutheran schools in Milwaukee, each serving low-income north side students, each part of the private-school voucher program, and each with high aims when it comes to academics and character traits. The schools have a variety of contests across the year. In the fall, they had a “Hope Idol” contest.

The winning entry was a video made by sixth-grade students from the Hope Fortis school, 3601 N. Port Washington Rd. It’s a take-off on Beyonce’s hot song and video, “Single Ladies.” This is one is called “Scholar Ladies.” The students’ effort is picking up steam as a YouTube video — there have been more than 100,000 hits on it, it’s been featured on CNN, and the student are determined to find ways to promote it until they get at least 1,000,000 hits.

In the students’ version, the goal is not to “put a ring on it” but to get high grades by working hard, and to keep your eye on 2016 — the year their class will graduate high school.

How Lonely Was that Walk?

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:January 14, 2010
Post category:Milwaukee Milwaukee Public Schools

The clock in my car said 12:34 p.m. Thursday while I waited for a car to pass before I pulled out of my parking spot on N. 53 rd St. I watched as the car turned on to W. Vliet and immediately pulled in front of the Milwaukee Public Schools central administration building. The passenger in the front seat got out and slowly walked by himself to the front door of the building.

It was Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. And he was playing out a scene in what appears to have become a lose-lose political situation for him.

The bid by Governor Jim Doyle, Barrett, and others to overhaul governance of MPS, giving the mayor dominant power over the school system, is on life support, at best. The effort is deadlocked in the Legislature. It appears to be decidedly on the unpopular end of sentiment in Milwaukee, especially among African Americans. And several days of pretty intense efforts to reach some form of compromise with backers of a less-extensive plan to shift power in MPS pretty much blew up on Wednesday. The two sides simply and apparently irresolveably disagree on how much power a mayor should have over MPS.