Joseph D. Kearney – Page 15 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Expanding the Public Policy Initiative

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:August 6, 2013
Post category:Marquette Law School Public

This is a notable week in the Law School’s public policy initiative. First, it marks the beginning of Charles Franklin’s work as professor of law and public policy—an appointment announced this past May by Rev. Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., president of the University. Professor Franklin, formerly professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, will continue to direct the Marquette Law School Poll and, more broadly, will work with Mike Gousha, Alan Borsuk, and faculty at the Law School and beyond in the continuing development of the Law School’s public policy research and outreach. Second, Craig Gilbert joins us in a sense. Mr. Gilbert, the head of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Washington bureau and the author of The Wisconsin Voter blog at the newspaper, will hold a six-month fellowship established by the Law School through its Sheldon B. Lubar Fund for Public Policy Research. This is along the lines of work last academic year by the newspaper’s Rick Romell, which resulted in an extensive multipart series in the newspaper reporting on the economic future of this region. Mr. Gilbert is especially well-regarded in both journalism and the academy (you can get a sense of that here). His project during his time as a Lubar Fellow will focus on aspects of political polarization in the region, an activity that (to bring me back to where I began) no doubt will occasion his collaboration with Charles Franklin and Mike Gousha, among others at Marquette. On behalf of all who comprise the Marquette Law School community, it is a privilege for me welcome to both Charles and Craig as they expand the contributions we make to the community even beyond our core mission of legal education.

The Interstate Commerce Act: A Final Convocation

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:August 13, 2012
Post category:Business Regulation Legal History Public

Earlier this year I observed the 125th anniversary of the Interstate Commerce Act, among the most important statutes that Congress has ever enacted. I allowed that a future issue of the Marquette Law Review would publish essays by a number of leading scholars concerning the Act and its legacy. With the summer issue of the Marquette Law Review now out, that future is now.

The remembrance is titled “125 Years Since the Interstate Commerce Act: A Symposium in the Form of a Final Convocation.” As I explain in my Foreword (“The Last Assembly of Interstate Commerce Act Lawyers”), the essays, collectively available at the link at the beginning of this paragraph, are by an impressive collection of scholars:

James W. Ely, Jr., the emeritus Milton R. Underwood Professor of Law and emeritus Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, recalls “The Troubled Beginning of the Interstate Commerce Act”;
Randal C. Picker, the Paul and Theo Leffmann Professor of Commercial Law at the University of Chicago Law School, writes of the interplay between the Act and the antitrust law enacted only three years later, in “The Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Act: Playing Railroad Tycoon”;
Thomas W. Merrill, who is Columbia University’s Charles Evans Hughes Professor of Law, discusses the unusual phenomenon of administered contracts in the Act’s regulatory scheme, suggesting that the form of regulation was more impressive than the fact (in “The Interstate Commerce Act, Administered Contracts, and the Illusion of Comprehensive Regulation”);
Paul Stephen Dempsey, Tomlinson Professor of Global Governance in Air & Space Law and Director of the Institute of Air & Space Law at McGill University, focuses on the ICC as an agency, taking us broadly from its creation to its demise, in “The Rise and Fall of the Interstate Commerce Commission: The Tortuous Path from Regulation to Deregulation of America’s Infrastructure”;
Richard D. Cudahy, Senior Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit (whose scholarly and judicial career was recently celebrated by the Yale Journal on Regulation, but no link is available), points us to the future, sketching the possible relevance of the Interstate Commerce Act’s paradigm for modern debates over regulation (“The Interstate Commerce Act as a Model of Regulation”); and
James B. Speta, Professor of Law at Northwestern University (and my fellow editor of this symposium), concludes the project with a critical assessment of the Act’s pertinence in an area—namely, telecommunications—with almost as much importance to the twenty-first century as the railroads (which the Act was passed to control) possessed in the nineteenth: “Supervising Discrimination: Reflections of the Interstate Commerce Act in the Broadband Debate.”

Most of these essays are short, and each is an engaging assessment of an act whose legacy can be felt today, not only in the general fact of the administrative state whose creation began with the Interstate Commerce Act but also in specific debates (as Prof. Speta demonstrates) about regulation today. We invite you to read the essays.

Milwaukee’s Future in the Chicago Megacity

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:July 10, 2012
Post category:Marquette Law School Milwaukee Public

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?

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