Congratulations to AWL Scholarship Winners Carstens and Fahley

On Tuesday, September 11, 2012, the Milwaukee Association for Women Lawyers (AWL) Foundation honored two Marquette University Law School students with scholarships.

Codi Carstens, 2L, received the AWL Foundation scholarship.  The AWL Foundation Scholarship is awarded to a woman who has exhibited service to others, diversity, compelling financial need, academic achievement, unique life experiences (such as overcoming obstacles to attend or continue law school), and advancement of women in the profession.  Carstens is a first-generation college graduate and a first-generation law student.  She is supporting herself through law school, yet she has found the time for public service, already completing 180 hours of volunteer time doing pro bono work in the community, primarily through the Wisconsin chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel.  Carstens is also a member of the student chapter of AWL.

Alaina Fahley, 3L, received the AWL Foundation’s Virginia A. Pomeroy scholarship.  This scholarship honors the late Virginia A. Pomeroy, a former Deputy State Public Defender and a past president of AWL.  In addition to meeting the same criteria as for the AWL Foundation scholarship, the winner of this scholarship must also exhibit what the AWL Foundation calls “a special emphasis, through experience, employment, class work or clinical programs” in one of several particular areas:  appellate practice, civil rights law, public interest law, public policy, public service, or service to the vulnerable or disadvantaged.  Fahley has a sister with autism.  Her experience with her sister has emphasized for her the importance of working with vulnerable populations and her plan to practice public interest law upon graduation. Fahley is a member of the student chapter of AWL and a member of the Pro Bono Society, and she volunteers at the Marquette Volunteer Legal Clinic. She is currently the President of the Public Interest Law Society.  

Congratulations to both women for outstanding service and for their representation of Marquette University Law School.

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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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