Marquette Law alum Katie Maloney Perhach discusses her leadership role at Quarles & Brady in this interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is managing partner for the Milwaukee office and the chair of its Financial Institutions Litigation Group.
If you’ve spent much time around me, you know that I’ve got horse-crazy daughters. My oldest is fourteen, and she’s just starting her tenth year of riding. Her sisters joined in the fun a couple years after she started. That has meant all sorts of things for our family, one of which is that I’ve spent an awful lot of time watching riding lessons.
It’s no surprise that spending that much time watching my daughters being taught a set of skills has led me to reflect on my own teaching. There are, I’ve concluded, lots of connections, and so in this post I’m going to try to persuade you of two things: The first is that learning to be a lawyer is in meaningful respects similar to learning a skill like how to ride a horse. (Or, for that matter, figure skating.) Both processes involve not merely the acquisition of information, but also a somewhat ineffable sense for how to engage in an activity. The second is that those similarities can help provide some interesting perspectives on what we do in law schools.
I am breaking no new ground in making the first point. Karl Llewellyn, for example, wrote of the value to lawyers and judges of “situation sense” and “horse sense” and of understanding that – and even more, understanding how – legal rules will often tell a tale that is incomplete or even wrong when applied to certain fact patterns. This is a view of law as a craft. Doing it well requires cultivating an often inarticulable sense of what sorts of responses are appropriate to which situations. We might call it judgment. Some of this is doctrinal knowledge, the content of the “law.” But, Llewellyn admonished new law students, as memorialized in The Bramble Bush, “it does not make so very much difference whether you remember the specific rules. Good, if you do. But even if you do not, there remains a deposit, formless, curious—but one which informs your hunches in the future.” Few of us remember much in the way of doctrinal specifics from our first semester in law school, but none of us could claim that we didn’t learn much.
The Milwaukee Public Schools system is “at a tipping point” where improvements in how the system is run and a strong base of community support need to lead to better overall academic achievement for students, the new superintendent of MPS, Darienne Driver, said Wednesday.
Speaking at an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall, Driver said, “We have to get results.” But she said MPS is going through a lot of transitions that are helping make schools poised to do that.
But Driver, who became superintendent Oct. 1, spoke a short time after two influential Republican legislators in Madison released the outlines of a plan to deal with poverty in Milwaukee that could see control of some low-performing schools taken from MPS and given to independent charter schools. The ideas floated by Sen. Alberta Darling and Rep. Dale Kooyenga suggest the tough time MPS is likely to have in the current legislative session.
Driver said the ideas from Darling and Kooyenga “really get away from the investment we should be making in our public schools.” She said it could be “devastating” to schools that would be closed and re-opened. The idea of creating something similar to the Recovery School District in New Orleans, which the legislators suggested, is a distraction that would not yield good results overall, Driver said.