My first experience with Professor James D. Ghiardi occurred in the fall of 1960 when I was a first year student at the Marquette Law School. I learned that Jim was my Torts teacher. Prior to that time I had never known any attorney. There were none in my family, and none of my friends had relatives who practiced law. I recall thinking in that first Torts class, if Jim was what being a lawyer was about, I had selected the right form of postgraduate education. He was the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

At the inception, Jim made it clear to me and my fellow students that he was there not only to help us learn what Torts was all about, but also so that we learned to think, speak, and act like lawyers. We were not there to learn how to be philosophers, economists, sociologists, or political scientists. He also made it clear to all of us that knowing the elements of any particular Tort theory did a lawyer little good if he or she did not know how to prove those elements in court. What I experienced in that class made me want to take Jim’s other courses as well. It was very clear to anyone who cared to observe that Jim loved the law and what he was doing.

But Jim Ghiardi was much more than a law professor. He was and remains a dedicated husband, father, and now grandfather. He has served as President of the State Bar of Wisconsin. Election to that post speaks volumes about the respect he earned from lawyers in the state — even those who were not Marquette alums. He also served as a representative of the State’s bar in the ruling body of the American Bar Association. Jim loves sports, being a Marquette Basketball season ticket holder for as long as I can remember. Up until a few years ago he was also an avid golfer.

Several years after I graduated from the Law School, I felt a great deal of pride after making a presentation at a Wisconsin State Bar meeting. Thereafter, a member of the audience approached me and said that he was one of Jim’s former students. He then said that when he closed his eyes while listening to me he could have sworn that it was Jim making the presentation. High praise indeed.

Students and faculty of the Marquette Law School in the early years of the twenty-first century have the benefit of an affiliation with an institution that most outside observers seem to feel is right smack dab in the middle of the law school pool.  Our US News & World Report overall rating is almost exactly in the middle of the pack, and the American Bar Association reports that we are the 90th most selective of the 184 ABA-approved law schools in the United States. Our current median LSAT score (157) is exactly the median LSAT score for all students enrolled in ABA-accredited law schools, and our median GPA is almost exactly the national median as well. In the peer ratings collected by the US News survey, our score (2.3) is exactly the median for all schools, as is our ranking by judges and lawyers (2.8). (Although our judge and lawyer ranking is higher, it is, like our ranking by law professors, exactly at the median. Apparently, lawyers and judges generally think more highly of law schools than do law professors.)

While no one really likes being exactly in the middle — I also think we are “underrated” — it does offer an interesting perspective on contemporary legal education, particularly in regard to who is studying law and who is teaching law at this point in the history of American legal education. Figuratively speaking, half of the schools are above us and half below us, and all are within sight.

I have had the good fortune to attend two law schools as a student and to teach at five (Marquette, Chicago-Kent, Washington University, Washington & Lee, and the University of Virginia). All five schools at which I have taught are usually ranked among the top half of American law schools, and three of them are usually closer to the top than the middle. My overwhelming impression is that the law school experience is essentially the same at all five schools. The curriculums are virtually identical, and the quality of teaching at all five is equally high. I found students at the University of Virginia to be more academically sophisticated than students at the other four, but I found that the experience of teaching at the other four was quite similar. The biggest differences lie in the placement opportunities, which do vary considerably from school to school.

I would be interested to hear the thoughts of others — students, faculty, and alumni — about the significance of our position in the middle.