Eckstein Hall Named Project of the Year

Eckstein Hall, our new home, was today named Project of the Year in The Business Journal’s 2011 Real Estate Awards program. The announcement was made at a luncheon program at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Milwaukee: although various awards were announced in advance, this top award was shrouded in secrecy until near the end of the program.

This is a gratifying recognition for the Law School and the broader University — indeed, all who were involved in the project, including the design architect, Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, and the construction firm, Opus North Corp. Tom Ganey, University Architect, and I asked Kathy-Kugi Tom and Jerad Protaskey, project managers for the University and Opus North, respectively, to accept the award.

The panel of four judges deciding the awards included Bob Greenstreet, Dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and formerly city planner for Milwaukee.

It is an especially welcome honor for all associated with the Law School for a particular reason. The scales of a close competition (especially between Eckstein Hall and the new Columbia St. Mary’s hospital) were tipped by “the impact [Eckstein Hall] was having on the community,” according to Mark Kass, The Business Journal’s editor in introducing the awards.

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Nathan Fishbach Honored—and the Law School, Too

Nathan Fishbach Nathan Fishbach, shareholder at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, received the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association’s Judge Myron L. Gordon Lifetime Achievement Award today. That itself might be worth recording in these annals (cf. Prof. Jessica Slavin’s blog post from two years ago concerning awards by the EDWBA to Michael O’Hear and Tom Shriner). For Nathan has been a member of our Advisory Board and otherwise a great friend of the Law School.

But permit me to note that the Law School was allowed to share in the honor in an important (and lasting) sense. For Nathan’s firm, Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, announced today that it will use the occasion of Nathan’s award to honor him by creating the Nathan Fishbach Student Development Fund at Marquette Law School. My role in this is small (being on the receiving end of a gift or saying “thank you, yes” is easy), but I wish to elaborate on this matter a bit.

Nathan is a highly skilled attorney, with extensive litigation experience on behalf of—and thus demands on his time from—the federal government, commercial interests, and private individuals. Yet even in the press of business, he has struck me with his interest and investment in the future of the profession. An important example of this was his work a decade ago in the founding of the Eastern District of the Wisconsin Bar Association.

Along these same lines, his interest in Marquette Law School has been especially outstanding. A graduate of Villanova Law School, Nathan has been a great champion of our students, speaking to classes, mentoring them individually, and taking the interest—and time—to work with them on their career development.

The Fishbach Fund, created at the Law School by Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, will support our bringing in speakers, from Wisconsin and across the country (indeed, the world), whose experiences and counsel will help future law students gain a greater sense of the profession into which they are entering. It will also provide for programs, workshops, or other opportunities designed to promote a greater integration between Marquette law students and the profession. That we have been historically good at such integration means that this sort of gift should help us reach for greatness.

Thank you to Nathan for being an engaged exemplar over the years, and to the attorneys of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek for their selecting Marquette Law School as the place to perpetuate Nathan’s honor.

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Rofes Receives Kutulakis Award

AALS Peter RofesIt was a privilege today to attend the lunch of the Section on Student Services at the Association of American Law Schools’ annual meeting. For our colleague, Professor Peter K. Rofes, received the section’s Peter N. Kutulakis Award. This award recognizes the outstanding contributions of an institution, administrator, or law professor in the provision of services to law students. Our Associate Dean for Administration, Bonnie M. Thomson, nominated Professor Rofes for the Kutulakis Award, and Professor Rofes richly deserves it.

Permit me to repeat what I said a year ago concerning Prof. Rofes. The context was my reporting to students, in my beginning-of-semester letter, that Prof. Rofes had elected to return this academic year to full-time faculty duties, in the tradition of the Law School, after lengthy service as director of the part-time program and associate dean for academic affairs. I wished to explain “my thanks and admiration”:

I have been especially impressed by Prof. Rofes’s ability—even while administering the academic program, including determining course offerings, working with full-time and adjunct faculty, overseeing the schedule, and running the Academic Support Program—never to lose sight of the individuals with whom he works and never to fail to make time, for example, for the individual in need of time, attention, or assistance. There is a lesson for you in his work. For your work as a lawyer also will be in support and service of others; indeed, the work of the lawyer inheres most basically in the attention to and care for another. I express at graduation my hope that you have found some models in these, your early days in the profession. You—we—would do well especially to consider the important ways in which Prof. Rofes is an exemplar.

Congratulations, Peter—and thank you.

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