I appreciate being invited to be the featured alum blogger for April.  This being my first blog experience, I am going to ease in with an answer to the question of the month:  What was your most useful or enjoyable extracurricular activity in law school?

Since I married a classmate following graduation, I don’t need to tell you how useful or enjoyable that was, except to report that I am still very happily married to Mark, also a member of the Class of 1978.

I have very fond memories of the potluck dinners shared by the women students of my class.  We weren’t a huge number — 28 of the 130 graduating students.  Remarkably, most of us would attend these ad hoc affairs every other month or so.  Mothers would bring their babies.  It allowed us to develop a bond that was pretty unique.  Besides the wine and food, we shared outlines (I understand good outlines are still a hot commodity), strategies, complaints, fears, and hopes.  It was, in fact, an informal collaboration that worked very well for me and I suspect many others as we struggled through those three tough years.

While women are no longer such a small group, I imagine these sorts of gatherings still occur among all the students in some manner.  It was for me an enjoyable, healthy way to deal with the anxiety and stress of the law school experience.  And at that time, with one-third of the first year students not making it to the second year, it was indeed stressful — perhaps more about that era of the law school later.

The semifinal round of this spring’s Jenkins Moot Court Competition took place last night.   As previously described, sixteen top students from the Appellate Writing and Advocacy Class were invited to compete  in the Jenkins Competition, in teams of two.  Last week, that field of eight teams was narrowed to four.  Last night’s arguments narrowed the competition to the final two teams.  The finalists are Alyssa Dowse and Timothy Sheehey, arguing against Jessica Farley and Brent Simerson.

Congratulations and good luck to the finalists.  The final argument will take place at the Milwaukee Federal Courthouse at 6 p.m. this Thursday, April 2.  Join us to see two terrific oral arguments, and the exciting outcome of the year’s competition.  More information about the competition and the schedule of the events on Thursday, including the argument and the reception afterwards, can be found here.  

Kudos (on getting this far) and best wishes (as we move forward) to the sixteen upper-level students who are competing this week in the quarterfinals of the Jenkins Moot Court Competition. The students earned this right based on their top performance in last fall’s Appellate Writing and Advocacy course, which is a prerequisite or gateway to both the intramural Jenkins Competition and all extramural or interscholastic moot-court competitions. The students are paired into eight teams of two for purposes of the Jenkins Competition:

• Lindsay Caldwell & Lindsey Johnson
• Alyssa Dowse & Tim Sheehey
• Jessica Farley & Brent Simerson
• Sandy Giernoth & Megann Senfleben
• Tim Hassel & Joe Brydges
• Rachel Helmers & Nick Harken
• Amber Peterson & Allison Ziegler
• Nicole Standback & Bridget Mueller

Each team writes a brief in the first half of the spring semester and has a chance to argue twice in a round of quarterfinals. Thereupon, based on a weighted scoring of the brief and the oral arguments, four teams advance to the semifinals. The briefs having been “filed” several weeks ago, the oral arguments begin this week, and culminate in the Jenkins Finals at the United States Courthouse at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 2.

More information on the reasons the Law School structures its moot-court competition this way can be found in this article from the Marquette Lawyer or at the moot-court webpage (and a student’s perspective can be found in a very fine post by a guest blogger last month, Jessica Franklin). I hope that all will join me in congratulating and wishing well to this year’s Jenkins competitors.