This semester I taught a terrific group of students in my Legislation class. We had engaging and thought-provoking discussions about the legislative process and statutory interpretation. Indeed, some of those discussions continue on this Blog with some of my students participating in the on-line discussion about judicial activism.

As part of the class, I required my students to attend a number of the “On the Issues” programs hosted by our Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Law, Mike Gousha (see http://law.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/site.pl?on-the-issues/index for a list of the sessions from this semester along with corresponding podcasts). My reasoning for doing so, as I explained to my students, was to help them connect the material we learned about and discussed in class to real-world examples that impact us in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and nationally. And after each “On the Issues,” we had fruitful discussions about what the guest speakers said and how that related to the topics we grappled with in class.

I had some really wonderful professors in law school. I could easily write about a number of them in expressing my gratitude for their influence on my legal career. However, one in particular — Professor Kathleen A. Sullivan — sticks out for me. Kathleen (no one called her Professor Sullivan . . . indeed, she’d have none of it) was one of my professors in the Community Legal Sevices clinic at Yale. I began law school after seven years of Jesuit education (three years at Loyola High School and four years at Loyola Marymount University, both in my hometown of Los Angeles). And while I enjoyed my first semester classes, none of them resonated with me in terms of my educational background and values.

But then I enrolled in the clinic, and all that changed. Kathleen inspired us to embrace the enormity of our responsibility in representing and serving those who could not afford legal representation. Her message was clear: Our clients — those suffering from intense poverty — deserved the respect, dignity, autonomy, and privacy that we all shared. Kathleen also emphasized that our clients deserved zealous advocates who worked tirelessly and ethically to gain justice for them. And she led by example — spending long days in the clinic training her students and serving her clients, despite battling cancer.