Congratulations to AWL Scholarship Winners Carstens and Fahley

On Tuesday, September 11, 2012, the Milwaukee Association for Women Lawyers (AWL) Foundation honored two Marquette University Law School students with scholarships.

Codi Carstens, 2L, received the AWL Foundation scholarship.  The AWL Foundation Scholarship is awarded to a woman who has exhibited service to others, diversity, compelling financial need, academic achievement, unique life experiences (such as overcoming obstacles to attend or continue law school), and advancement of women in the profession.  Carstens is a first-generation college graduate and a first-generation law student.  She is supporting herself through law school, yet she has found the time for public service, already completing 180 hours of volunteer time doing pro bono work in the community, primarily through the Wisconsin chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.  Carstens is also a member of the student chapter of AWL.

Alaina Fahley, 3L, received the AWL Foundation’s Virginia A. Pomeroy scholarship.  This scholarship honors the late Virginia A. Pomeroy, a former Deputy State Public Defender and a past president of AWL.  In addition to meeting the same criteria as for the AWL Foundation scholarship, the winner of this scholarship must also exhibit what the AWL Foundation calls “a special emphasis, through experience, employment, class work or clinical programs” in one of several particular areas:  appellate practice, civil rights law, public interest law, public policy, public service, or service to the vulnerable or disadvantaged.  Fahley has a sister with autism.  Her experience with her sister has emphasized for her the importance of working with vulnerable populations and her plan to practice public interest law upon graduation. Fahley is a member of the student chapter of AWL and a member of the Pro Bono Society, and she volunteers at the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic. She is currently the President of the Public Interest Law Society.  

Congratulations to both women for outstanding service and for their representation of Marquette University Law School.

Continue ReadingCongratulations to AWL Scholarship Winners Carstens and Fahley

Addicted to the Internet?

Whoa, you like to think that you’re immune to the stuff, oh yeah
It’s closer to the truth to say you can’t get enough
You know you’re gonna have to face it, you’re addicted to [the Internet].

Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love (1986) (more recently covered by Florence & The Machine (2010))

This morning, I awoke and reached for my smartphone to turn off the alarm. Because I already had the phone in my hand, I checked the day’s weather (for both the Madison area, where I live, and Milwaukee, where I work). Then, of course, I had to check email, to see what had come in during the night. And, while I was at it, I took my turn in the eight concurrent games with three different people that I have going on Words with Friends. After that, I finally got out of bed.

According to an article by Tony Dokoupil in the July 16, 2012 issue of Newsweek, that kind of morning makes me just like more than one-third of smartphone users. We are the ones who check our phones before we even get out of bed. Really? Only one-third of us do that? 

Technology has allowed us to be continuously connected to a wider world, and too many of us are tethered to those portals.

Continue ReadingAddicted to the Internet?

Thinking Like a Lawyer Redux

This week, Marquette University Law School welcomed its Class of 2015.  The start of an academic always has an energy to it unlike other times during the year.  Excited and nervous 1Ls begin their journey to their J.D.s, steeped those first couple weeks in what seems like a foreign culture with a foreign language. While they’re not exactly sure what they’re going to learn in those 1L classes, new students do understand, within days of being in Eckstein Hall, that what they will learn is how to “think like a lawyer.”  Whatever that means.  With that, I am reposting something I wrote several years ago that remains important:  “Thinking like a lawyer” is a legal skill, not a life skill.

At the start of each academic year, I cannot help but to think of Professor Kingsfield, the notorious contracts professor in The Paper Chase. The various classroom scenes where Professor Kingsfield grills student after student on classic contracts cases like Hawkins v. McGee have for years served as a sort of example of the “typical” 1L experience with the dreaded Socratic method.

While Professor Kingsfield surely sits at one end of the spectrum for professorial style, the Socratic method he uses endures. It is, as one text notes, law school’s “signature pedagogy.” It’s the way the law school professors across the country have been teaching law students about legal analysis for more than a century.

And students learn. They begin their first year of law school with, to paraphrase Professor Kingsfield, “a head full of mush.” Even by the end of that first semester, though, most 1Ls have developed an ability to turn that mush into cogent analysis, to make fine-line distinctions, to look for weaknesses in another’s argument, and to argue both sides of any issue; in other words, they learn to “think like a lawyer.” This “thinking like a lawyer” is undoubtedly a necessary professional skill; however, mastering the process can come at a personal cost.

Continue ReadingThinking Like a Lawyer Redux
Newer Posts
Older Posts