Constitutional Rights in Action

All eyes are on Wisconsin these days.  Governor Scott Walker unveiled details of his budget repair bill on February 11; the bill itself is 144 pages, but provisions that immediately captured attention were those that remove the collective bargaining rights of most state and local employees.  By Monday, February 14, when the bill was introduced, protestors began to fill the Capitol building in Madison.  As the week went on, more and more people descended on the Capitol to protest the passage of the bill, with Saturday’s crowd topping at an estimated 68,000, 60,000 of whom flooded the Capitol grounds and square, while another 8,000 filled the Capitol building itself.  Even more were expected yesterday, which was a furlough day for many state employees.

What is happening in Madison, Wisconsin, is monumental, and I am not solely referring to the proposals contained in the bill.  What is exceptionally important here is that we are able to see the expression of constitutional rights in a most obvious way, a fact that I think has received little attention.

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Finding Your Own Path

Life sometimes turns out not at all as we planned.  And that can be a very good thing.

Take my life, for example.  As an undergraduate, I had it all planned:  I was going to be a career woman in corporate public relations or a professional writer, living in a large city — Chicago, perhaps — unencumbered by family demands because I decided I did not want children.  Fast forward a couple of decades and here I sit, in the living room of my home in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, a mother of two sons, a lawyer, and a law professor.

How and when did that master plan change?  As I think it must be for most people, there wasn’t necessarily one grand event that put me on a different path.  Instead, it was little choices I made along the way, little, but, as it turned out, significant choices, such that one day I woke up and realized I was in a place that vastly differed from where I thought I’d be. When I think of it, I am always reminded of something author Marion Winik said in her book Rules for the Unruly:  Living an Unconventional Life: “The path is not straight.”

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It’s National Punctuation Day

SemicolonToday is National Punctuation Day.  Yes, there really is such a day (it’s the sixth annual one, actually), and grammar geeks like me are celebrating.  There’s even a national baking contest where contestants are supposed to bake something in the shape of a punctuation mark.

Lynne Truss, the author of the best-selling book Eats, Shoots & Leaves:  The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, says that “[P]unctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling.”  It’s a courtesy that applies not only to stories, of course, but to any written product – letters, articles, memos, briefs, and emails.  Punctuation clarifies the writer’s meaning.  Take these seven words:  A woman without her man is nothing.  There are two very different readings of this sentence, depending on how it is punctuated.  It could be:  A woman, without her man, is nothing.  Or it could be:  A woman:  without her, man is nothing.  What a difference punctuation makes!

What’s your favorite punctuation mark?

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