Beyond the Cold, a Forecast for Legal Issues in 2014

Welcome to the New Year, fellow Marquette Law students and faculty! I am pleased and proud to be writing to you as the student blogger of the month for January. I’ll hopefully contribute something useful to you all over these 31 days and nights as we venture into the great unknown that is 2014.

It seems apt to talk about the years ahead and behind as we mark the beginning of the former and the closing of the latter. For 2014, the economy appears to be finally heating up, and 2014 looks to be more like a Ferrari than a Fiat, and that is something to celebrate. There are exciting issues heading to or being considered by the Supreme Court, including recess appointments, contraceptive mandates for religious non-profits, and gun rights. Even the Circuit Courts are getting a lot of attention as we see splits forming in the handling of bulk collection of phone call data by the NSA. Congress actually closed out 2013 in the spirit of cooperation by passing a budget sans major tantrums on the Senate floor. I’ll be graduating this calendar year, marking the end of my formal education, and my cell phone contract is up, so there’s that. I wish us all luck and success in the coming year as students look for summer placements and graduating 3L’s look for permanent positions. 

Continue ReadingBeyond the Cold, a Forecast for Legal Issues in 2014

Congratulations to the 2014 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competitors

The Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition is an appellate moot court competition for Marquette law students and the capstone event of the intramural moot court program. Students are invited to participate based on their top performance in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy course at the Law School.

Congratulations to the participants in the 2014 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition:

Dane Brown
Michelle Cahoon
Tyler Coppage
James DeCleene
Sarah Erdmann
Joel Graczyk
Amy Heart
Brian Kane
Amanda Luedtke
Christopher McNamara
Jennifer McNamee
Elizabeth Oestreich
Nicole Ostrowski
Frank Remington
Amanda Toonen
Becky Van Dam
Kara Vosburgh
Derek Waterstreet

Students will begin writing their appellate briefs in January with the rounds of oral argument commencing later this spring. The competition includes preliminary oral argument rounds (March 22 and 23) and a semifinal (March 27) and final round (April 2).

The Jenkins competitors are fortunate to have the opportunity to argue before distinguished members of the bench and bar from Wisconsin and beyond.

The competition is named after the James G. Jenkins, the first Marquette Law School dean.

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The Skills I Use in Law School, I Learned From Third Graders

When I first came to law school, I thought that I was at a disadvantage compared to a lot of my peers. Instead of coming straight to law school out of undergraduate studies, I had been an elementary school teacher for about three years before I decided to return to school to study law. I did not have an undergraduate degree in anything related to the law, politics, or even social sciences. I had never set foot in a law firm office before. The only exposure that I had had to the law was mostly through the depictions seen on television and in the movies.

While some of my peers had taken courses to prepare them for the study of law, I was making macaroni pictures with third graders and teaching them about division and grouping. While most pre-law students spent time with counselors to prepare them for the law school journey, I was attending teacher conferences and working with guided reading groups in the classroom.

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