Finding Your Own Path

Life sometimes turns out not at all as we planned.  And that can be a very good thing.

Take my life, for example.  As an undergraduate, I had it all planned:  I was going to be a career woman in corporate public relations or a professional writer, living in a large city — Chicago, perhaps — unencumbered by family demands because I decided I did not want children.  Fast forward a couple of decades and here I sit, in the living room of my home in suburban Madison, Wisconsin, a mother of two sons, a lawyer, and a law professor.

How and when did that master plan change?  As I think it must be for most people, there wasn’t necessarily one grand event that put me on a different path.  Instead, it was little choices I made along the way, little, but, as it turned out, significant choices, such that one day I woke up and realized I was in a place that vastly differed from where I thought I’d be. When I think of it, I am always reminded of something author Marion Winik said in her book Rules for the Unruly:  Living an Unconventional Life: “The path is not straight.”

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Lubar Fund for Public Policy Announced

Marquette University Law School The University has announced today that Sheldon B. Lubar has made a $2 million gift to the Law School. Mr. Lubar is a much-admired business and civic leader: he is the founder and chairman of Lubar & Co., has been a presidential appointee with Senate confirmation, and has engaged deeply in seeking to improve this region. The gift, one of the largest in the history of the Law School, will create the Lubar Fund for Public Policy. The Lubar Fund will support public policy research and initiatives, including conferences and symposia; faculty research; curriculum development; and programs that enhance the teaching of public policy issues at Marquette Law School. The gift represents extraordinary confidence by a renowned business and civic leader in our public policy work at the Law School. Although that work began to be distinctly recognized with the appointment of Mike Gousha several years ago, it has been my sense—more than an intuition but still evolving into a full plan—that we are only scratching the surface here. I look forward to our effort to mine this field, for the betterment of the community, and am grateful to Shel Lubar for his support and confidence.

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Some Exam-Taking Advice from Professor Kircher

[Editor’s note:  In this post, Professor John J. Kircher provides the first installment in our new series, “What are your best exam-taking tips for law students?”]

To begin with, always be careful to understand the “call” of the question. That is, what is the professor asking you to do? If he or she casts you in the role of the defense counsel and asks you to evaluate that side, don’t waste your time explaining what a great case the plaintiff has under the circumstances provided!

Also, if the question is jurisdiction-specific (e.g., Wisconsin), don’t waste your time and effort explaining the law of all other jurisdictions.

Finally, if you are uncertain about the answer to a particular question, go on to the other exam questions.  It is better to have one unanswered question than to spin your wheels and waste time trying to figure out its answer only to have inadequate time to properly answer the remaining questions.

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