Judges & Judicial Process – Page 55 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Imaginative Justice in the Trial Court: Judge Sarah Evans Barker to Deliver Hallows Lecture Next Week

Post author:Joseph D. Kearney
Post published:April 7, 2009
Post category:Judges & Judicial Process Speakers at Marquette

Next Tuesday, April 14, will be the occasion for the Law School’s Hallows Lecture. This annual event, named in memory of the late Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice (and Marquette Professor) E. Harold Hallows, brings to the school a distinguished jurist who in a variety of ways has occasion to converse with and teach students, faculty, and others. Past Hallows Lecturers have included Justice Antonin Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. More recently, over the last three years, the Hallows Lecture has served as the occasion for a significant address by a judge serving on a federal court of appeals (as can be seen in the 2006 speech by Judge Diane S. Sykes, L’84, of the Seventh Circuit, the 2007 speech by Judge Carolyn Dineen King of the Fifth Circuit, and the 2008 speech by Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the Ninth Circuit).

I am very pleased that this year, for the first time, the Hallows Lecture will be delivered by a distinguished sitting trial judge: viz., the Honorable Sarah Evans Barker of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. Judge Barker, who has served on the federal bench since 1984 and is president of the Federal Judges Association (a voluntary organization of Article III judges), is a national figure among trial judges and the federal judiciary more broadly. For the Hallows Lecture, she has selected as her title “Beyond Decisional Templates: The Role of Imaginative Justice in the Trial Court,” and takes as her point of departure Judge Richard A. Posner’s recent book, How Judges Think (Harvard, 2008).

The following is from the Law School’s description of the lecture: “Accepting Judge Posner’s premise that under certain circumstances judges must perform as legislators, Judge Sarah Evans Barker will attempt to expand his focus on appellate decision-making to include a discussion of when and how this approach is and can and should be properly applied in the trial court and of the role of imagination when adjudicating in the ‘open area.'”

The lecture will take place in Room 307 at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 14. The event is open to all, but registration is required.

Judicial Campaign Talking Blues, Part 1

Post author:Richard M. Esenberg
Post published:April 3, 2009
Post category:Judges & Judicial Process Political Processes & Rhetoric

March law review madness has pretty much kept me from getting my blog on, so I have a whole slew of pontification on back order.

One of the things I am wondering about is campaign rhetoric in judicial elections. We all hate it, but why?

I have been thinking about it through the lens offered by one of my favorite law school professors, Duncan Kennedy. He said that there were two species of error in the way that non-lawyers think about the law. One is lay cynicism — the idea that judges do whatever they want to and that judging was just politics by another name. (There was, of course, a sense in which Duncan believed this — probably still does — but it was at a structural rather than decisional level.)

One of the things that I think we hate about many judicial campaign ads is that they appeal to this lay cynicism.

May Jurors Twitter?

Post author:Jessica E. Slavin
Post published:March 17, 2009
Post category:Judges & Judicial Process

From Scientific American:

Avid tweeter Jonhathan Powell of Fayetteville, Ark., will have his name in the New York Times tomorrow. How do we know this? From his Twitter feed, of course. That would be the same feed he used last month to tweet about a trial while a member of the jury, which pleased his Twitter fans but prompted the defense attorney in the case to seek a new trial. On what grounds? That Powell’s tweets allegedly showed he was biased against defendant Russell Wright (and his company Stoam Holdings, a building materials company in Fayetteville, Ark.), who was found guilty of mismanaging investors’ funds, The Morning News reports. The jury awarded investors who sued Stoam $12.6 million.

The article mentions another, similar case. I will confess that this tweeting/twittering business is one technology I haven’t gotten involved in at all, so I don’t fully understand how it works. I take it, though, that the twitterer (tweeter? twit?) posts statements for others to read. For instance, Mr. Powell posted about his experience as a juror, while he was still a juror.

To me, it seems unwise to permit jurors to twitter during the time when they are performing their duties. Just as it would seem unwise to permit jurors to write a column in the morning edition of the newspaper about how things were going on the jury.

Updated: It turns out that John McCain also twitters. Perhaps I should try it. In the summer.