Lawyers & Life: A Law School Course that Looks to the Future

I really didn’t know what I was getting into when I signed up for the class “Lawyers & Life.” I knew that in the course description, potential enrollees were warned that, if we were not up for a challenging semester, we should beware as this would not be a free ride. For the first day of class, each of the ten of us were required to prepare a short presentation answering each of the following questions:

• What is your personal conception, your vision, of professional success and satisfaction for you as a lawyer?

• How have you arrived at this conception, this vision, of what success and satisfaction mean for you and your career?

• How will you know when (or whether) you achieve your conception, your vision, of success and satisfaction?

• What particular skill or trait do you deem most indispensable for you to have in your arsenal in order to maximize the prospects that you achieve the success and satisfaction to which you aspire? How well is such a skill or trait already developed in you? What plans do you have to more fully develop and refine that skill or trait?

Though it seemed a bit daunting (and I put off the assignment for a while for that reason), I was pleasantly surprised when I began crafting my presentation.  I was really enjoying myself. For the first time since I began my law school endeavor, I felt that a professor was asking questions about me and about my greater career goals.

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A Jewel in Our Midst

Throughout the history of legal education, there has been a consistent call for greater levels of experiential learning and especially clinical education in the law school curriculum. This call has received renewed strength in the Carnegie Report released in 2007. It reminds us again of the importance of building skills for lawyering, for serving as counselors to those who seek our assistance.

Marquette University Law School, for over thirteen years, has been polishing a gem that provides our students with a rich opportunity to some of the very skills required to be an effective lawyer (you might remember the list from the first blog…communication, listening, writing, negotiation and time management, to list only the top five survey responses). This gem is the Small Claims Mediation Clinic.

The Small Claims Mediation Clinic is housed in the Milwaukee County Courthouse and provides pro se litigants an opportunity to access student-led mediation services in an effort to resolve the disputes themselves. This program was the brainchild of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske and I have had the honor and privilege to work with Janine at the Clinic for several years and have served as the faculty member for a number of semesters.

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Judge Sutton’s Hallows Lecture

Hallows LectureMarquette University Law School is fortunate to welcome this week the Hon. Jeffrey S. Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Judge Sutton will deliver our annual Hallows Lecture on Tuesday, February 28, at 4:30 p.m. in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. His lecture, titled “Barnette, the Roosevelt Appointees, and the Progressive Embrace of Judicial Review,” focuses on Board of Education v. Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1943 decision holding that the First Amendment protected students unwilling on religious grounds to salute the American flag. The 6-3 decision overturned Minersville School District v. Gobitis, a 7-2 decision only three years earlier. Appointees of Franklin D. Roosevelt were central in this drama: Robert H. Jackson wrote for the Court in Barnette, over the dissent of Felix Frankfurter, who had authored Gobitis but found himself abandoned by William O. Douglas and Hugo L. Black. Judge Sutton will discuss how this reversal of course happened so quickly and why it marked a turning point away from the progressive opposition to many forms of judicial review. The lecture is free and open to the public (registration is required) and will bear 1.0 CLE. The Hallows Lecture—perpetuating the memory of the late E. Harold Hallows, Chief Justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and longtime Professor of Law at Marquette University—is one of the Law School’s flagship events, precisely because we have been the beneficiary of contributions from such distinguished jurists as Judge Sutton.

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