Celebrating Poetry

wordsApril is National Poetry Month, which may be Marquette University President Scott R. Pilarz, S.J.’s favorite month.  And for good reason.  Poetry can sometimes say what we can’t; it can touch our hearts and our souls with its inspiration, its longing, its joy, and its sadness.

Last year, on this blog, several of us wrote about poetry, sharing our favorites, composing new poetry in both traditional and different ways, or exploring poetry in and about the law.  As student Gabe Houghton noted this post, there are some judges who compose opinions in verse.

As April closes, I just wanted to remind everyone that poetry should be celebrated all months and remember that there are many kinds of poetry.  Songs can be considered poetry set to music. There are also poetry slams.   My favorite in this last genre is Taylor Mali, teacher and poet.  You can see him perform his poem “Totally like whatever, you know?” here.  It’s a nice reminder for those of us who love language that what we say, as well as how we say it, matters.

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Frozen Assets

Frozen AssetsProperty law – who could forget the Rule Against Perpetuities, fee simple, remainders or Blackacre from your second semester at Marquette Law? For me, it made me seriously question my abilities to reason through complex issues. For my sister, who practices Trusts and Estates law, it is her way of life.

But that second semester, the opportunity to apply the principles of property law became my reality. It seemed every semester I slogged through law school, I had a personal or business crisis that overlapped with my studies. We used arbitration to resolve a breach of contract during a commercial building project. We used an LLC formed by our neighbors to contend with an eminent domain issue, when the utility company condemned and forever marred our property with a gas line. And most interesting of all, we used property law and many other legal principles to deal with a business purchase.

As a foundation for this, let me explain the rest of my professional life. I graduated from Iowa State’s Veterinary School in 1981 and have run my own small animal veterinary practice in rural Wisconsin, one hour north of Milwaukee, since then. After 25 years out of the classroom, I had the itch to go back to school, for the opportunity to have a second career, and because I missed the energy of being in an academic setting.

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For Love of the Game…

I had my “eureka” moment about appellate advocacy when I was still a law student. With too few credits to even apply for the Milwaukee District Attorney’s “prosecutor clinic,” I still made an appointment to meet with a deputy DA to see if there was some way I could still volunteer and be useful.

I was stashed aside in a room with a table, lots of books and stacks of papers to wait for the meeting, but as I waited my eye was drawn to a slip opinion sitting on the table. I started to read, of course. The case, as I recall, had something to do with how much Spanish language interpretation was due to a defendant at a particular point in the process. I never got to the end of the opinion, so I don’t know how it turned out.

But I remember feeling the light turn on in my head, recognizing in an instant that this was an area of the law where, if you believed passionately in something and gave it your all in the higher courts, win or lose, your words and your efforts had a resonance beyond just a single case.

Of course, at that time I don’t think I even realized that there was a difference between “published” and “unpublished” opinions. Too late now, the fuse was lit!

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