The Law School Welcomes Visiting Professor Mary Beth Beazley

This semester, the law school is hosting another highly-esteemed  professor as a Robert E. Boden Visiting Professor of Law:  Mary Beth Beazley.  Professor Beazley is Associate Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.  She has taught at Ohio State for more than 20 years, and taught at Vermont Law School and the University of Toledo before that.

Professor Beazley is the author of numerous articles related to legal writing, and one of the most widely-used textbooks in law school Appellate Advocacy courses (including our own):  A Practical Guide to Appellate Advocacy . She served as the Legal Writing Institute’s President from 1998 until 2000; served as editor-in-chief (and member of the board of editors) for Legal Writing:  The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute. She is also the immediate past president of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD).

In 2006, Professor Beazley’s excellence in teaching, writing, and service earned her the prestigious Thomas F. Blackwell award, given each year by the Legal Writing Institute and ALWD, to recognize a person who has demonstrated  “an ability to create and integrate new ideas for teaching and motivating legal writing educators and students.” Furthermore, in 2008 she received the Burton Award for Outstanding Contributions to Legal Writing Education.

In short, she is one of the most-accomplished and well-regarded professors in the legal writing field.  It is a privilege to have her teaching here in our program for a semester.

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Lincoln in Liberia

On August 26, MULS welcomed the Class of 2013, hosting a welcome mixer in the atrium of Eckstein Hall, the new home of the law school.  During this event, Dean Joseph Kearney unveiled a portrait of Abraham Lincoln created by visual artist Don Pollack.  A few days later, the painting was hung in the Aitken Reading Room on the third floor of the new building.

The portrait uniquely places Lincoln reading the newspaper within a horizontal vista next to stacks of books which represent the learned man on his campaign trail many days before he became the sixteenth president of the United States.  Professor Michael McCrystal explains that MULS commissioned this painting of Lincoln to symbolize the importance of reading: “Although we mean the building to be very contemporary in most respects, the intent of the reading room is to draw on strong academic and legal traditions to inspire students to serious work, and a Lincoln portrait seemed to serve this theme.”

The image seeks to capture Lincoln the great lawyer and the great reader.  It also serves as a reminder that the former president spoke of the importance of reading when on September 30, 1859 he addressed the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, right in the same spot where the Marquette campus now sits.  On that day, Lincoln remarked,

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”

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What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School, Part I

Editors’ Note: As each new 1L class begins its legal education, our thoughts often turn back to our own first few weeks of law school.  This post begins a new series on “What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School.”

I went to law school for all the wrong reasons. When I started in Georgetown’s part-time, evening division, I had been doing real estate development for four or five years. I was a client before I was a law student. I became quite annoyed that my attorneys seemed to be patronizing me. They spoke a language that was foreign to me. I decided to go to law school to find out what the mystique was all about and, hopefully, to emerge as a better developer.

About six weeks into law school, I realized that I was “turned on” by my studies. I told myself that I knew that I had played a lot as an undergraduate at Penn, but I had never before been intellectually excited by school. I told myself to slow down and enjoy the journey. I did just that and it changed my life. After law school, I gave up my real estate business and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after which I joined the Georgetown Law faculty. I came to believe that the journey through law school was one of the best parts of my life.

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