Category: Legal Education

Many in our community will recall Professor Atiba Ellis, who served as Boden Visiting Professor at the Law School during the fall 2017 semester.  He will return to the Law School for the fall 2018 semester—this time as professor of law and a member of the permanent faculty.  We are delighted that he will be joining us.

During his semester as the Boden visitor, Professor Ellis taught a course entitled Contemporary Issues in Civil Rights.  He also participated broadly and enthusiastically in the Law School community, including by delivering a faculty workshop, serving as a featured guest for one of Mike Gousha’s “On the Issues” sessions, and being consistently present in the common areas of Eckstein Hall for engagement with students and colleagues.

Professor Ellis joins Marquette Law School from the law school at West Virginia University, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2009.  In 2017, in addition to his semester at the Law School, he served as a Visiting Scholar at Duke University Law School.  Professor Ellis has taught courses in the areas of Election Law, Civil Rights Law, Race and the Law, Property, and Trusts and Estates.  His research and scholarship has focused on voting rights law and theory, critical legal theory, and legal history.  He is a well-established and highly regarded scholar whose work relates directly to matters of great present concern within Milwaukee and Wisconsin more generally.

Please join me in welcoming Professor Ellis (back) to Marquette University Law School.

Thirty-two teams from across the country arrived in San Francisco at the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on March 1, all prepared to present oral arguments in the National Appellate Advocacy Competition regional. Two Marquette Law teams were among those.

Andrew (AJ) Lawton and Ashley Smith were seeded 10th after three rounds of argument. They advanced to the fourth round but faced a tough bench. They lost that round to one of the top four teams from the regional. However, their brief was named the fourth best in the competition. Anjali Sharma and Adam Woodside presented outstanding oral arguments in their three rounds, often facing tough questions from an engaged bench. They kept their composure throughout, achieving commendable oral argument scores.

Both teams were assisted by practitioner coaches Elleny Christopolous, Kate Maternowski, and Zachary Willenbrink (L’11). Congratulations to team members for their outstanding representation of Marquette Law.