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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People Who Have Shaped the Teaching Careers of Our Faculty—Part 5: Walter Weyrauch, Mentor and Friend

The editors of this blog have asked a number of faculty members to write about those who have been influential in their understanding of the law. In this, the fifth post in the series, Professor Alison Barnes writes about her mentor and friend, Walter O. Weyrauch (1919-2008), who was Professor of Law at the University of Florida and Honorary Professor of Law at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Walter Weyrauch remains a unique thinker in the law, known by many worldwide, and for more than two decades since I took his classes at University of Florida, my principal guide and inspiration in law and law teaching. Our dialogue, which included hundreds of snail mail letters on goofy art note cards, reflected Walter’s world view and legal philosophy, and confirmed and developed mine.

In demeanor, he had an impassive face and long pauses. What seems a dissonance in style became cause for student comment towards the very end of his teaching career. He said of his student evaluations: “They noticed I have a German accent” for the first time since he began to teach at University of Florida 50 years before. His chuckle over this was signature. Indeed, perception of him had evolved from the days when he was rumored to have been a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. (Chuckle.) Well into his eighties, he negotiated his retirement three years away. He said, “I thought I would be ready; I am not ready.” In part, he feared he would have too much time to reflect on unresolved feelings about his own experience.

Walter provided to me two versions of his memoirs, one hard copy (typed on his manual typewriter) and a later electronic revision, scanned in by his assistant, for my editing. He had received annotations from several scholars, but these were the last so I have worked with them and hope they will be available for any who wish to read, search for their own names, comment.

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Advice to New Law Students

As Ben Stone, one of my favorite TV lawyers, once said, “All clichés are true.” One is particularly true in law school — don’t miss the forest for the trees. Our classes and the studying that accompanies them are certainly the most important thing we have going. This is a school, and we are here to learn to be lawyers. However, classes are not the only way we learn that. If you let your classes become your trees, you will miss the forest that is Marquette Law School, which, if you let it (and you should), will teach you more than just the law. I was prepared to torture the law-school-as-forest comparison into a severely strained metaphor involving trees, plants, trails, streams, and woodland animals, but I’ll spare you. Instead, I’d like to offer some advice on making the most of your law school experience.

Get wired in. If you have a smartphone, put your MU email on it. If not, get in the habit of checking it regularly. Law school is like a job, and you don’t want to miss a memo from the boss. I can’t count how many times I answered, “Where did you hear that?” with, “It was in our email.” Don’t find out your class was cancelled by being one of three people sitting alone in the classroom for fifteen minutes. Don’t find out about free food by watching the last of it parade by in the hands of your email-checking classmates. Definitely don’t find out the parking garage is closed for the day by rolling up to the FULL sign, fifteen minutes before class starts. That last one really hurts.

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