Federal Law & Legal System – Page 134 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Obama’s Applause Lines on Education

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:November 5, 2009
Post category:Education & Law President & Executive Branch

teacher President Barack Obama’s 35-minute speech on education at Wright Middle School in Madison on Wednesday was interrupted by applause at many points, but most of the reaction was pretty low-key. Three lines drew what seemed to be more enthusiastic responses from the crowd of more than 500, most of them teachers, parents, and students at the 250-student school. Each of those lines says something significant about public sentiment and Obama administration priorities on education issues.

One: Obama said, “I’ve got to be honest, we’ve got to do a better job of moving bad teachers out of the classroom, once they’ve been given an opportunity to do it right.” His calls for recruiting higher-quality teachers and rewarding top teachers better didn’t get applause, but this line did. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a telephone interview after the speech that this didn’t surprise him — it happens wherever the president speaks about education, he said. Raising the quality of teachers, in large part by doing more to identify quality teachers (and those who aren’t) is one of the highest, but most difficult, priorities for Obama and Duncan. And moving out the ones who really aren’t good at it is especially difficult, particularly given the defensiveness of teachers’ unions when such issues come up.

Two: His call for overhauling the way testing is done nationwide.

Myron Gordon, R.I.P.

Post author:Richard M. Esenberg
Post published:November 5, 2009
Post category:Eastern District of Wisconsin Milwaukee

I only really knew Myron Gordon as a judge on senior status and tried only one case before him. It was a challenge by the NAACP to the method of electing judges in Milwaukee County. The plaintiffs alleged that county-wide elections of judges denied black voters the opportunity to elect candidates of their own choice and sought election of judges on the basis of sub-county districts. We represented the Wisconsin Judges Association, which had intervened as a defendant. The judges did not want to be elected from smaller districts in which voters might not appreciate the array of considerations facing a judge. I remember, in particular, the testimony of one of our client’s members who said that he did not wish to depend only on his neighbors in a North Shore suburb for reelection. He felt that it would make it very difficult for him to give a defendant from the inner city the benefit of the doubt.

At the time we tried the case (1996), black candidates for judicial office had not done well in Milwaukee County. That has changed, but not because the plaintiffs prevailed. Judge Gordon ruled in our favor and the Seventh Circuit affirmed. I’d like to think that events — subsequent successes by black candidates on a county wide basis — have validated his judgment, but I may not be the best one to make that judgment.

Judge Gordon wasn’t — on the bench — a warm person.

Seventh Circuit Criminal Case of the Week: Of Hearsay and Bootstraps

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:October 31, 2009
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Evidence Federal Criminal Law & Process Seventh Circuit

seventh circuit The court staked out no new legal ground in its opinions last week, so I’ll just briefly describe a case that nicely illustrates a classic problem in evidence law. Based on information provided by a confidential informant, Milwaukee police stopped a Ford Excursion on suspicion of drug activity. Inside were Marc Cannon (the driver), David Harris (Cannon’s cousin), $8,900 in cash (found in Harris’s pockets), and a brick of cocaine. The cash pointed to Harris’s likely involvement in the drug-dealing operation, but, without more, the evidence still seems short of beyond a reasonable doubt.

At trial, the government thus relied heavily on the testimony of the confidential informant, Anderson, who recounted a series of interactions with Cannon and Harris. Perhaps most damaging to Harris was testimony that Cannon told Anderson that his cousin was coming to Milwaukee with a signficant amount of cocaine. This testimony, of course, was hearsay: Cannon himself did not testify, and Harris had no ability to cross-examine him. In order to overcome the hearsay problem, the government relied on the exception for statements by co-conspirators. But this required the government to prove that Cannon and Harris were indeed co-conspirators, and the strongest evidence of that were the very statements whose admissibility was at issue. The government’s argument thus had something of a boot-strapping character.