Marquette Law School Launches Institutional Repository

The Eckstein Law Library is pleased to announce the formal launch of the Marquette Law Scholarly Commons, which offers free, online access to a growing collection of scholarly work of the Marquette University Law School community. Today, the Scholarly Commons has over 5300 items, including all four student-edited, Marquette law journals as well as articles written by Marquette University Law School faculty published in the Marquette law journals and elsewhere. In the future, look for additional journal articles to be added to these existing collections and for new collections to be announced. Although the full-text documents in the journal and faculty scholarship collections are the heart of the Scholarly Commons, the repository also serves as a gateway to other endeavors of the Law School community. Follow links to read the Faculty Blog or the Marquette Lawyer, learn about programs such as On the Issues with Mike Gousha, and explore faculty working papers and accepted articles in Marquette’s Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.

This repository grew from a shared vision of Dean Kearney, the Law Librarians, Associate Dean for Research Michael O’Hear and others to provide convenient and global access to the scholarly output of the Marquette University Law School. While preserving the scholarly output of the Law School, the Marquette Law Scholarly Commons also expands the reach of faculty scholarship and Law School journals. Indeed, in the past few weeks the repository had visitors from Australia, Japan, India, Brazil and China, among others.

We encourage you to be a regular visitor to the Marquette Law Scholarly Commons. If interested, you can monitor new items as they are uploaded to the Scholarly Commons by enabling the Marquette Law Scholarly Commons RSS feed in an RSS Reader or setting up personalized email notifications to be sent when content that meets specified search criteria is added. The Marquette Law Scholarly Commons is a service of the Eckstein Law Library.

 

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Parking Garage Quietly Marks the 225th Anniversary of the Northwest Ordinance

This post is authored by J. Gordon Hylton and Jane Casper.

July 13, 2012 marked the 225th anniversary of the signing of the Northwest Ordinance.

As some users of the Eckstein Hall Parking Garage know, excerpts from the text of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance are transposed on the walls of the Tory Hill/Clybourn Street floor of the garage and on the elevator doors on the same level. (The Magna Charta excerpts are on the walls of the underground garage’s other level.)

The Northwest Ordinance was one of the first landmarks of constitutional government in the United States. It “organized” the Northwest Territory, the first United States territory, and it set down a series of guidelines that would dramatically affect the development of the “western” United States.

The Northwest Territory included the present day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota, and its passage was made possible by the willingness of eastern states, particularly Virginia, to cede their western land claims to the national government.

The Ordinance dictated that new states would be created from the Territory when the population warranted; it abolished African-American slavery in the region during the territorial stage; it propagated the first bill of rights issued by the United States government; it committed the policy of the United States to the support of public schools (and religion generally); and it established the “gridded township” system of development advocated by Thomas Jefferson that defines to political organization of states like Wisconsin to this very day.

At the same time the Congress was enacting the Northwest Ordinance in New York City, our so-called “Founding Fathers” were meeting in Philadelphia and were in the process of drafting the Constitution that would replace the Articles of Confederation. That the Northwest Ordinance was unaffected by the ratification of the new Constitution was confirmed on August 7, 1789, when new President George Washington signed into law a re-enacted Northwest Ordinance (which contained only minor alterations).

Plans are in the works for a festive event in the summer of 2014 to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the signing of the re-enacted Ordinance.

 

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An Interview with Professor Edward Fallone

[Editor’s Note: This blog is the second in a series of interviews with faculty and staff at the Law School.]

Professor Edward Fallone is a graduate of Boston University, where he majored in Spanish Language & Literature. He holds a J.D. from Boston University. Following law school, he was an associate at a Washington, D.C. law firm where he practiced corporate law and white collar crime. He joined the Marquette faculty in 1992. He has also taught international criminal law at the Marquette summer law programs at the University of Brisbane and Justus Liebig University Law School in Giessen, Germany. His current research interests involve issues of constitutional interpretation and judicial methods. In addition to his work at the Law School, he is of counsel at a Milwaukee law firm and has held leadership roles in Milwaukee’s Hispanic and immigrant community.

Question: How did you become interested in law and teaching law?

Oddly enough, I became interested in law teaching because I absolutely hated one of my law professors. I was very interested in Corporate Law, and I found the class readings on insider trading and hostile takeovers to be fascinating. But my professor in that course was extremely boring, and he taught mostly by reading the teacher’s manual out loud to the class. I remember sitting in that class and thinking to myself, “I could do a better job than him.” Of course, nowadays when I am teaching a class I often look out over the faces of my students and I wonder if any of them are thinking the same thing.

Question: What do you most enjoy about teaching law students?

I like being in the classroom. I have never considered teaching to be a one way conduit of information. In my opinion, a class discussion can be just like an intelligent conversation over dinner, and it can be just as entertaining (without the wine, however). When a class goes well, the topics of the conversation can be wide-ranging and unexpected. If the students are prepared for class and engaged, then I have fun. Of course, this doesn’t happen every class period. Sometimes a particular subject matter lends itself to a more one-sided lecture format. Sometimes the students are unprepared. However, there are enough good days to make the job rewarding.

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