Mental Health and Law School

I have never been particularly excited to begin a new year of school. My mom, to my chagrin, keeps a photo of one of my first days of school on the family fridge. Clad in a breathtakingly dated wind-breaker, with a full sized Marquette University Law Schoolbackpack dwarfing my elementary school frame I lean against a tree at the bus stop. Flanked by my too-young for school sister who smiles from ear to ear my mom snapped the photo. I think that photo was both for me and my mom. I got a visual reminder that my family was always going to be there for me; my mom got a picture she could use to embarrass me with, and a memento of her favorite and only son.

I was reminded of this photo as email after email bombarded my inbox explaining the new COVID procedures for the in-class semester. Any excitement for my final year in school was dampened considerably. The Law School’s Instagram post which showed what the law school looks like now, a labyrinth of blue painter’s tape and signage, showed just how much the precautionary measures had sapped the building of its warmth. The Law School is, to be frank, depressing in its current arrangement.

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Farewell to Professor Julian Kossow

Many of us on the Marquette Law School faculty were saddened to learn of the death earlier this month of Professor Julian Kossow. Julian had a long and varied career, primarily in academia and real estate. As he recounted in this blog post, Julian went to law school because of his frustration as a developer in dealing with lawyers. Once in law school, though, he found that he was fascinated by the law as a field of study. Legal academia was so much to his liking, in fact, that he returned to it as a professor after graduation and a clerkship on the D.C. Circuit, joining the Georgetown faculty in 1970. Later, he practiced as a real-estate lawyer and then resumed his career as a developer.

Julian could not resist the call of law-teaching indefinitely, though. In the 1990’s, he began a second career as a law professor, teaching at St. Thomas and Stetson in Florida, and then landing at Marquette in 2004. We were delighted to have him as a faculty colleague for the next decade.

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Violent Crime & Recidivism: Symposium Issue Now Available

The threat of violent recidivism looms large in policy debates about sentencing and corrections. Prison populations in Wisconsin and across the United States remain near historic highs. Yet, efforts to bring down those populations often run into the objection that most of the individuals in prison have been convicted of violent crimes. What if these individuals reoffend after release? The stakes seem frighteningly high when we contemplate the possibility of shorter sentences for individuals who have physically harmed others in the most damaging and disturbing ways–shootings, stabbings, sexual assaults, and so forth.

Last summer, Marquette Law School hosted a conference that brought together leading researchers to address the question of whether there might be better alternatives than long-term incapacitation  for responding to the threat of violent recidivism. Those of us in attendance enjoyed a thought-provoking series of presentations and some lively Q&A with audience members. Now, the papers from the conference have been published in a symposium issue of the Marquette Law Review.

Here are the contents:

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