Supporting Servicemembers and Veterans

DF-SC-84-11899On this Veterans Day we remember the service of so many in the armed forces and merchant marine.   We are grateful for their public service and wish to support them in their return to civilian life.  As we have been made all too aware, the sacrifices extend beyond the servicemembers to their families and communities.   

Almost two years ago, we convened a group of servicemembers and veterans here at Marquette Law School to explore ways the Law School could support their service.    Spearheaded by a district legal services attorney for the U.S. Coast Guard (which maintains an active base in Milwaukee), this committee grew to include officers and enlisted personnel from the Army, Air Force, Naval Reserve, and Wisconsin National Guard, as well as veterans.   This committee alerted us to some of the legal challenges facing military personnel, their families, and veterans.   For example, Judge Advocates General can provide advice to military personnel regarding civil legal matters, but they do not represent them in civilian courts.   Sometimes a service member is not attached to a unit – either separated or in Individual Ready Reserve – and thus does not have easy access to a Unit JAG.  Other times, JAG offices may be at a headquarters base hundreds of miles from their duty station and unfamiliar with local court rules.   Similarly, while veterans receive a number of benefits through the county, state, and federal veterans administrations, access to legal counsel is not one of them.

Thus, with support from the State Bar of Wisconsin and the ABA,  Marquette Law School launched SAVLAW: Servicemembers and Veterans Legal Assistance for Wisconsin. 

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Marquette Law School Celebrates Pro Bono Week

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to attend two inspiring events – the Milwaukee Bar Association’s first Pro Bono Publico Awards ceremony, held at the annual State of the Court luncheon. Marquette 3L Meghan O’Connor was among the honorees. Meghan was awarded this honor for her substantial pro bono commitment at the Law School, particularly her role as the student liaison for the newly launched Legal and Medical Partnership for Families at the Downtown Health Center

In the evening, a Milwaukee Young Lawyers Association gathering brought together recent law graduates and public interest law firms in an effort to increase awareness about pro bono opportunities in the Milwaukee area. Again, Marquette Law School was prominently featured, both by the presence of many alumni and the many pro bono opportunities that the Law School has initiated not only for its students, but for lawyers in the community as well.

These events were a precursor to the National Pro Bono Celebration scheduled for October 25 through 31, 2009.

Sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service, the celebration is a coordinated national effort to showcase the great difference that pro bono lawyers make to the nation, its system of justice, its communities and, most of all, to the clients they serve. The week is also dedicated to the quest for more pro bono volunteers to meet the ever-growing legal needs of this country’s most vulnerable citizens.

Marquette Law School is enthusiastically joining this celebration. On Friday, Dean Joseph D. Kearney will announce the opening of the new Milwaukee Volunteer Legal Clinic at the Milwaukee Justice Center in the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Dean Kearney will appear alongside the Chief Judge from the First Judicial Circuit, the Clerk of Courts, and the President of the Milwaukee Bar Association. This will be the fourth location for the MVLC, which provides pro bono opportunities for nearly 150 law students and 100 lawyers every year. Marquette Law School was a key partner in the development of the Milwaukee Justice Center, an effort led by the Milwaukee Bar Association, and provides many volunteer law students at the MJC’s self-help desks as well.

The following week, on Thursday, January 29, law students will join pro bono attorneys and members of the Coalition for Access to Legal Resources at a luncheon to celebrate pro bono week. CALR was another effort initiated by the Law School through the MVLC to provide a regular forum for public interest law firms to meet and share information on legal services in greater Milwaukee. In celebration of pro bono week, the members of CALR will gather at noon in Marquette’s Eisenberg Hall to discuss legal services, public interest careers, and pro bono opportunities with law students.

Marquette has made tremendous strides to increase the opportunity and engagement in legal services pro bono publico, for both Marquette law students and the Milwaukee bar. Three-quarters of our students now engage in some form of pro bono activity. Under the excellent leadership of Marquette Law School’s Pro Bono Coordinator, Adie Olson, that percentage is expected to grow. Marquette’s Pro Bono Society has increased membership each year, and we are pleased to be so committed and engaged in this good work in our community — just another way Marquette is building a new law school.

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Justice Involves Communities

This past week, the 2009 Marquette Law School Public Service Conference focused on the efforts of communities across the nation to rethink criminal justice policy with a greater emphasis on community involvement in both planning and implementation.  Over the past two decades, Wisconsin has more than quintupled its public expenditures for corrections. At the same time, local communities have struggled with increasing jail populations and declining resources for treatment and reentry services.  At the core of this challenge is the desire to keep communities safe while providing more effective alternatives to long term incarceration.

These challenges are not unique to Wisconsin.  As keynote speaker Jeremy Travis pointed out,

As our nation has reacted to rising crime rates over the years, the response of many elected officials has been to turn to the funnel [arrest, prosecution and incarceration,] as a crime control strategy. . . . We have invested enormous sums of money in these crime control strategies, with profound consequences. . . . Most strikingly, the national rate of incarceration has more than quadrupled over the past generation so that America now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world.

This approach has been accompanied by a drop in the crime rate.  It also has had other sociological consequences which are not as easily quantifiable. 

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