Equal Pay Day, Rhetoric, and Reality

Image by: Pictures of Money, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Today was Equal Pay Day, the date that indicates how much longer a woman had to work to earn what a man earned in the previous year. More than 20 years ago, the National Committee on Pay Equity started selecting one day a year—always a Tuesday in April—to highlight the continued disparity between men’s and women’s wages.

Now, you can quibble with me about the precise numbers or you can try to explain to me that there isn’t really a gender gap (both of which have been done and probably will be done again); however, as the Pew Research Center noted last summer, though some groups of women have narrowed the gap, there in fact remains some gap in wages between white men and all groups of women.

Much of that gap in wages can be explained by differing levels of education, workforce experience, or occupation. But even when you control for all of those more concrete and measurable variables, there remains an unexplained gap that may—may not—have to do with gender discrimination.

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NAAC Team Advances to Octofinals in Boston

After three rounds of oral argument at the National Appellate Advocacy Competition (NAAC) regional in Boston this past weekend, Marquette University Law School students Tamara Johnson (3L) and Henry Twomey (3L) (pictured) were 2-1 and seeded ninth out of 32 teams. Johnson and Twomey advanced to the octofinals, but unfortunately lost a close match to another team. Attorneys (and former NAAC competitors) Lucas Bennewitz (L’15), Hiriam Bradley (L’16), Jesse Blocher (L’06), Michael Cerjack (L’08) coached the team.

Barry Braatz (3L), Alexandra Klimko (3L), and Brianna Meyer (3L) also competed in the Boston regional, facing tough competition each round. Their team was coached by attorneys Elleny Christopolous and Kate Maternowski, both of whom were former NAAC competitors for their law schools, and Zach Willenbrink (L’11). Professor Lisa Mazzie is the faculty advisor for both teams.

The NAAC is sponsored by the American Bar Association Law Student Division.

 

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A New Era: The Rule of Law in the Trump Administration

Well, here we are, January 20, 2017, and Donald J. Trump has been sworn in as this nation’s 45th president, though he achieved that position by losing the popular vote by the widest margin of any winning candidate in recent history (2.9 million more people voted for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton), and he arrives at his new position with the lowest approval rating of any president in recent history.

As numerous others before me have written, President Trump’s campaign was not traditional in any number of ways, and I expect that his presidency will follow that trend. For some, that’s been the whole point. For others, that’s a less-than-inspiring harbinger. I wrote this summer about my concern about the candidate’s rhetoric, proposed policies, and the rule of law.

Though he has since backed off some of his campaign promises (for example, about having a special prosecutor investigate rival Clinton for her use of a private email server—a favorite chant at his rallies was “Lock her up!”), nothing since that time has changed my view. I continue to believe that the president won’t be appreciably different from the candidate.

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