Wisconsin Access to Justice Commission Hearing: Student Perspective

Makda Fessahaye is a 2L student who has been working on research for the Access to Justice Commission.  Below she shares her thoughts about why a student might want to attend the Access to Justice hearing on September 13.

Cura Personalis. Marquette University Law School encourages us, as students, to follow the Jesuit educational principle, to care for the whole person, throughout our legal education, in the hopes that we embed this value into our legal careers. Through the expansive pro bono opportunities offered through Marquette, we have several chances to work with populations in great need of legal assistance. However, our calling to aid these populations does not disappear upon graduation; the need for legal assistance continues to grow. To properly demonstrate cura personalis in our legal careers, it is necessary to recognize the daily hardships our communities face and the legal issues that follow. Our Wisconsin low-income residents find difficulty with the limited and lack of access to justice to properly address the legal issues they encounter.

On Thursday, September 13, 2012, the Wisconsin Access to Justice Commission holds a public hearing at Marquette University Law School from 5:00pm to 7:30pm. At this hearing, we will have the opportunity to hear from our community leaders, judges, policy makers, and lawyers to share information about access to justice and the growing needs of low-income individuals. After hearing these testimonies, we hope to expand our knowledge, combine our efforts and properly address the lack of legal access available to our low-income population. 

Whether you are interested in going into the public sector or the corporate route, I strongly encourage you to attend this public hearing to better understand the community in which you are to serve. As future lawyers, we should acknowledge the issues that face several of our residents. Finally, as Marquette law students, we must identify with the whole issue, the whole community, and most of all, the whole person.

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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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