Don’t Be Afraid to Go to Law School, Minority Students Told

Lovell Johnson recalls a guy he looked up to in high school, a guy he thought could really succeed in life. Several years later, he ran into the guy. The guy was driving a cab. Nothing wrong with driving a cab, Johnson said as he counted the anecdote. But the guy said to him he could have gone to law school and made more of himself. And he didn’t.

Johnson decided he didn’t want to be like that guy. That guy was afraid to apply to law school; he was afraid to fail. So was Johnson. But Johnson overcame that, took the plunge, became a lawyer, and has been a well-known and successful Milwaukee County assistant district attorney for years.

“Don’t be afraid,” Johnson told about 150 Milwaukee high school students Thursday at a Youth Law Day conference at Eckstein Hall. “Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do it.”

That was one of the strong underlying themes as the students from a half dozen schools got a dose of knowledge about what it’s like to be a lawyer and a lot of encouragement to pursue that possibility.

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NAACP Leader: Photo ID Lawsuit Carries on 140 Years of Voting Rights Struggles

With its challenge to Wisconsin’s voter ID law, the NAACP is carrying on a struggle for voting rights that dates back to the post-Civil War era, James Hall, president of the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP, told the Law School’s Mike Gousha and an audience of more than 100 during an “On the Issues” session last week.

Hall, president of the organization since January 2011, emphasized the importance of voting and the long history in America of disenfranchising minorities and low income people by use of rules about voting. “There is so much repeating history,” he said.

The NAACP suit against the law, passed by the Wisconsin legislature in 2011 and requiring people to present an acceptable form of photo identification at the polls, led to a Dane County judge putting a halt to enforcement of the law through a temporary injunction a week ago. More legal action in that suit and other challenges to the law is expected in advance of the statewide election on April 3.

Hall, a practicing lawyer whose NAACP position is unpaid, said there were fewer than 20 prosecutions for voter fraud in Wisconsin in recent years. “Why, all of a sudden, this move to require a photo ID?” Hall said. “Certain types of people don’t have that.” Many of them are African American, he said. “In fact, it is a disenfranchisement law.”

The law was supported generally by Republicans and opposed by Democrats. Supporters said it was a sensible way to reduce chances of voter fraud, while opponents said its practical effect would be to put up barriers to voting for many low income people who don’t have drivers licenses.

Hall told Gousha that the civil rights organization, founded in 1909, remains very relevant. “across the country and particularly here in Milwaukee.” He said the city has some of the largest disparities in the country between African Americans and whites when it comes to income, employment, incarceration, and educational achievement.

Milwaukee and its leaders have not responded with the intensity that is needed to deal with the problems facing many black people in Milwaukee, Hall said. He said, “No, there is not the sense of urgency we would like.” He said the NAACP wants to work together with people from throughout the Milwaukee area in solving problems. “It is in our enlightened self-interest to address these disparities,” he said.

The Eckstein Hall session may be viewed by clicking here.

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Turkish Delegation Comes to Marquette Law School

Sixteen dignitaries from Turkey, including members of the Turkish Parliament, representatives from the Ministry of Justice, and professors, spent March 1 at Marquette Law School (MULS) to learn about Wisconsin’s experiences with restorative justice and mediation. The law school’s Restorative Justice Initiative organized a meeting with them and Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, retired Wisconsin Court of Appeals and Barron County Circuit Court Judge Edward Brunner, Milwaukee County Chief Judge Jeffrey Kremers, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Mary Triggiano, United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin James Santelle, and Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, along with other prosecutors and Wisconsin restorative justice professionals. Professor and restorative justice scholar Mark Umbreit, from the University of Minnesota Center on Restorative Justice and Peacemaking, as well as MULS Professors Andrea Schneider and Michael O’Hear, also attended the meeting. The Turkish delegation is working with the United Nations’ Development Program on judicial reforms and traveled to the United States for a week-long visit to learn about the use of mediation and restorative justice in our American court system. The group had meetings in Washington D.C. and New York and then came to Marquette University for one day. The Turkish Parliament has already incorporated Victim-Offender Dialogues into the Turkish criminal code and is working on drafting mediation legislation and part of the civil justice system. I will be traveling to Istanbul later this week to be part of a workshop on restorative justice for judges and prosecutors in Turkey.

All forty of us professionals, along with a group of my law students, met for our discussions in the MULS Conference Center. Our visitors were incredibly impressed with our wonderful new law school building and programs. Dean Joseph Kearney gave everyone a warm welcome thanking our visitors for “bringing the world to Marquette Law School.”

All of us learned a great deal from each other during the questions and answers (including those of us from Wisconsin hearing what others are doing in our own state.)

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