Some Glimpses into the Law School’s Office of Student Affairs

Student Walking in HallwayLast academic year, I wrote a series of blog posts giving some glimpses into the work and world of the Law School’s Office of Public Service (see here for the collection). While I did not know, in writing the first post, that I would feel moved to do a weekly series, this was a virtue of the first, in that otherwise I might not have posted at all. The vice was that I did not pass off enough costs. This year, in a related context, I’ll correct for the vice, even at the expense of forgoing the virtue.

All of this is to introduce a series of blog posts that a number of us at the Law School envision this semester concerning our Office of Student Affairs. The name may have somewhat less recognition than OPS for a variety of reasons. They include that the assistant dean leading the office (Anna Fodor) has an administrative title (assistant dean of students) that does not precisely correspond to the “office.” There is also the fact that “student affairs,” as we conceive it at Marquette Law School, is exquisitely enmeshed with academic affairs, which Professor Nadelle Grossman leads as associate dean. A “final” reason is that some of us tend to think of Suite 238, the home of student affairs, simply as “the main office,” no doubt having carried the association with us from Room 146 in Sensenbrenner Hall, the Law School’s former home.

In any event, this is the first post in our effort to capture or describe a sphere in which Dean Fodor and a number of colleagues work to support and enhance the experience of law students. They include Nicole Toerpe Mason, the Law School’s registrar; Stephanie Danz, assistant registrar; Sarah DiStefano, assistant director of student affairs (lest it be thought that we never use the phrase in a title); and Emma Geiser, whom you may recognize from her work at the front desk in the office. No doubt subsequent posts will mention them more specifically.

My particular interest in this post, besides providing the introduction(s), is to note the comprehensive work of the Office of Student Affairs team. In a sense, this can be captured by reference to the bookends of the academic year or even of the Marquette Law School experience: New Student Orientation in the fall and the Hooding and Commencement Ceremony in the spring. Both of these are “productions” of the Office of Student Affairs, even as they necessarily draw substantially on the work of numerous other colleagues and offices at the Law School.

To be sure, many things happen in student affairs between the beginning and the end, even while (as I said in my most recent welcome-back letter) students’ “time here is spent, in a sense, primarily with faculty.” Some relatively new experiments in the student affairs realm seem to be becoming staples. “Fall in the Forum,” a community gathering the past two Septembers, may be one such. I myself especially appreciate this effort—and only partly because it has helped support my long-held intuition that the Zilber Forum, at the center of Eckstein Hall, would be a fine venue for an event with live music. “Finals Breakfast for Dinner” is a few years older yet and has the advantage of being unambiguously about food for law students (on an evening during the fall and spring semester exam periods).

Those references are to particular events that tend to have a celebratory or community-building focus about them. Law School, like much of life, is sometimes a slog—or, to sound another theme from my most recent welcome-back letter, a process of “habit-making.” In that regard, the Office of Student Affairs also provides both a number of programs that span the academic year, such as the Academic Success Program and Marquette Law Mentorship Program (also well captured in this photo), and ongoing services, such as one-on-one advising and support touching on almost every aspect of student life. Future blog posts in this series will have occasion to delve into those.

Words and even examples can communicate only so much, but I am very confident that, through this series, what we find together will give us all a deeper sense of just what a special community Marquette Law School is.

Did I mention that I will not be doing all of the posts? That is part of the reason that I can be so confident.

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Marquette Law Students Contribute to Regional Study of Chloride Pollution

Chloride pollution of surface water and groundwater is an intractable problem. On one hand, sodium chloride (salt) is an important component of winter maintenance efforts that keep roads and other traveled surfaces free of snow and ice. On the other hand, many scientific studies have examined the potential risks to human health and natural resources associated with excess chloride in the environment, such as deteriorated ambient water quality, toxicity to aquatic and benthic organisms, adverse effects on vegetation, and even impacts to drinking water supplies.

Yet little of that scientific work has been directed toward developing legal and policy strategies to address the chloride issue. On the contrary, overapplication of salt has historically been the “safe strategy” to avoid liability in slip-and-fall cases in the absence of any coordinated policy approach.

To complicate matters, chloride is extremely difficult to remove using traditional water and wastewater treatment approaches, so use reduction appears to be the only effective management strategy. Given the public safety concerns, though, that approach is complex to say the least and must involve consideration of legal, environmental, and safety issues, among others.

Building on the proposed framework for the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission’s comprehensive Chloride Impact Study for the Southeastern Wisconsin Region, and working closely with Commission staff, Marquette Law School students Margaux Serrano (L ’24) and, prior to her graduation, Ivy Becker (L ’23) led the effort to develop a report examining a menu of responsive legal and policy options available to decision-makers in the Region. These include limiting slip-and-fall liability, relying on direct regulatory authority such as the Clean Water Act or corresponding state regulations and municipal ordinances, disseminating relevant information to stakeholders and the public, using alternatives to chloride where feasible, leveraging new policy strategies such as water quality trading, investigating integrated watershed management across jurisdictions, and leveraging economic measures and assistance.

Without question, these policy options will not all be appropriate in every context. After evaluating community-specific considerations, policy makers may choose one or more to reduce the problem of chloride transport to surface waters and groundwater. The report is not intended to suggest the elimination of chloride use in its most visible forms (winter maintenance and water softeners). Rather, it suggests that such use be optimized. Optimization carries “triple bottom line” benefits for the environment (in chloride reductions); for the economy (in cost savings on chloride expenditures and personnel hours); and for society (in improved public health).

A draft of the report is available here on the Commission’s Chloride Impact Study website.

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Marquette Hosts 2023 Junior Faculty Workshop

Last weekend, it was my privilege to participate in the Law School’s Ninth Annual Junior Faculty Works-in-Progress Conference. I look forward to this event every year, when we invite a group of scholars at the outset of their legal academic careers to present draft papers to each other and to commenters from the Marquette faculty, followed by an hour of nonstop feedback and discussion. The energy of these workshops is illustrated by the fact that in our last couple of sessions, participants were slamming their cards down on the table like Jeopardy contestants to grab a top spot in the comment queue!

This year we had a fabulous group of participants:

  • Julie Campbell, Faculty Fellow at the Jaharis Health Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law;
  • Jade Craig, Assistant Professor at Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law (currently visiting at the University of Mississippi);
  • Alexandra Fay, Richard M. Milanovich Fellow at the Native Nations Law and Policy Center at UCLA School of Law;
  • Meredith Filak Rose, Senior Policy Counsel at Public Knowledge;
  • Jordana Goodman, Assistant Professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law;
  • Jason Reinecke, Assistant Professor at Marquette University Law School; and
  • Lauren Roth, Assistant Professor at Touro Law Center.

Commenters from Marquette included Prof. Christine Chabot, Prof. Alex Lemann, Prof. Michael O’Hear, and Prof. David Papke. The workshop was organized by Associate Dean Nadelle Grossman, Professor Kali Murray, and myself, with the expert assistance of Stephanie Danz, Jourdain LaFrombois, Ben Manske, and the Facilities student workers.

It is a wonderful opportunity for the law school to bring together such a talented group of legal scholars from a wide variety of backgrounds and fields that ordinarily would not be in close conversation with each other, and to be able to offer constructive feedback at a stage when it could have a meaningful impact. Thanks to everyone for participating!

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