Kearney Recognized as “Lawyer of the Year”

The Milwaukee Bar Association recognized our own Dean Joseph D. Kearney as “Lawyer of the Year” at its annual meeting earlier today.  In presenting the award, MBA President Michael J. Cohen particularly cited Kearney’s ambitious vision for Eckstein Hall and his leadership in bringing that vision to life.  Cohen noted that our new facility will serve as a valuable resource for many years to come, not only for our students, but also for the wider legal community.

In accepting the award, Kearney connected the Law School’s activities in Eckstein Hall to the ideal of the lawyer as a public citizen:

The greatness of the legal profession lies not only in its practitioners’ primary activities—doing deals, righting wrongs, protecting freedoms—but also in their other pursuits. The lawyer is, frequently at least, a public citizen, keeping his or her eye on the public good.

The effort of and in Eckstein Hall concerns all aspects of the profession, including an attention to the public good even beyond the development of future lawyers.  

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Marquette Law Review Article Sparks Debate on Use of Dictionaries to Decide Legal Cases

A recent article in the Marquette Law Review was featured in Adam Liptak’s “Sidebar” column for the New York Times earlier this week.  Liptak wrote about the increasingly common citation of dictionaries in Supreme Court opinions:

A new study in The Marquette Law Review found that the justices had used dictionaries to define 295 words or phrases in 225 opinions in the 10 years starting in October 2000. That is roughly in line with the previous decade but an explosion by historical standards. In the 1960s, for instance, the court relied on dictionaries to define 23 terms in 16 opinions.

Liptak notes various objections to the practice.  For instance, dictionaries were not written for the purpose of supplying precise legal definitions, and the variety of different meanings suggested by the many available dictionaries creates opportunities for “cherry picking.”  He adds,

The authors of the Marquette study, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier and Samuel A. Thumma, said the justices had never really said precisely what dictionary definitions were doing in legal opinions. They urged the justices to explain “when and how dictionaries should be used, how a specific dictionary should be chosen and how to use a dictionary for interpretation.”

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Connections

The inside cover of America magazine always has a column entitled “Of Many Things.”  A recent piece by Edward Schmidt, S.J., focused on the importance of connections. “Connections great and small help us find balance and identity”, he wrote. Is that what I was seeking as we drove southeast from St. Paul headed to Milwaukee for my reunion?

Reunions of lawyers are like other reunions in that they connect or reconnect those that life has flung to places, close and far, from where the original connection took place. But lawyers are sui generis, and I use that term thinking of Justice Hugo Black who, I am told, did not use Latin in his opinions. Our uniqueness comes from our training and what we do. Over the years I have used examples of my “job” such as this past weekend’s match between Nadal and Federer. For every stroke of one, the other quickly and frequently with devastating accuracy counters with a stroke intended to thwart or defeat the other. Not unlike a wide receiver trying to run a post pattern or Dirk trying to stop our beloved D Wade, the lawyer is constantly countered by defenses offered by another lawyer. Unlike athletes, we seldom have throngs cheering our moves. Frequently the cause we advocate is unpopular

What we have done over the years has formed what we have become.  

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