Milwaukee’s Future in the Chicago Megacity
Marquette University Law School and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will host a conference next week. The conference title—“Milwaukee’s Future in the Chicago Megacity”—reflects that Chicago is one of the world’s emerging “megacities”; for example, it is ranked No. 6 in Foreign Policy magazine’s Global Cities Index (behind only New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong). An expansive new report by the international Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development argues that closer ties between the Milwaukee region and Chicagoland are of singular importance. At our conference, various panels, involving business leaders, elected officials, and public policy analysts, will assess that argument, with a general eye to these central questions: how closely should the Milwaukee region connect its future to Chicago, and how might that be accomplished through public policy and business might?
Marquette University Law School is fortunate to welcome this week the Hon. Jeffrey S. Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Judge Sutton will deliver our annual Hallows Lecture on Tuesday, February 28, at 4:30 p.m. in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. His lecture, titled “Barnette, the Roosevelt Appointees, and the Progressive Embrace of Judicial Review,” focuses on Board of Education v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1943 decision holding that the First Amendment protected students unwilling on religious grounds to salute the American flag. The 6-3 decision overturned Minersville School District v. Gobitis, a 7-2 decision only three years earlier. Appointees of Franklin D. Roosevelt were central in this drama: Robert H. Jackson wrote for the Court in Barnette, over the dissent of Felix Frankfurter, who had authored Gobitis but found himself abandoned by William O. Douglas and Hugo L. Black. Judge Sutton will discuss how this reversal of course happened so quickly and why it marked a turning point away from the progressive opposition to many forms of judicial review. The lecture is free and open to the public (
Time was, a “multiple-of-25” anniversary of the Interstate Commerce Act would have been an event. Law review symposia and even a speech by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter variously marked the 50th, 75th, and 100th anniversaries of the passage, on February 4, 1887, of “An Act to Regulate Commerce,” as the Interstate Commerce Act was denominated. Such celebrations (as these events substantially were) and studies seemed entirely appropriate, not simply on account of the Act’s introduction of federal entry-and-exit and rate regulation into the world of interstate railroads, but also for its status as the harbinger of the administrative state.