10 Things You Didn’t Know About Study Abroad Opportunities at MU Law

The interior of a classroom as Professor Pablo Rueda-Saiz stands at the front of the class and studdents sit attentively in their seats.
Professor Pablo Rueda-Saiz teaches Comparative Constitutional Law in Giessen, Germany
  1. An Orientation Session about your study abroad opportunities during law school, with important deadlines, will take place Thursday September 6 at 12:15 pm in Room 257 of the Law School.
  2. The shortest study abroad opportunity takes place over Spring Break 2019 and is a component of Professor Schneider’s International Conflict Resolution class.  The class will travel to Israel and study the Israeli-Palestinian conflict first hand.
  3. The month long Summer Session in International and Comparative Law, scheduled to take place in Giessen, Germany Saturday July 20 through Thursday August 15, 2019, includes multi-day field trips to Berlin and Hamburg.  In Hamburg this past summer, MU students danced until dawn and then had breakfast at the Fish Market as the sun rose.  Apparently, its a thing.
  4. MU Law regularly hosts exchange students visiting for an entire semester from the University of Comillas in Madrid, the University of Copenhagen, and the University of Poitiers  in France.  Oddly enough, these students find Milwaukee to be an exotic locale.
  5. At the same time, MU Law students have the opportunity to spend one or more semesters of their legal education as a visiting law student in Madrid, Copenhagen, or Poitiers.  We definitely get the better of that deal.
  6. Professor Sorcha MacLeod, who teaches in the Summer Session in Giessen, Germany, is an expert in the law of armed mercenaries.  And I thought I was cool because I teach Con Law.
  7. You can explore the Study Abroad homepage on the Law School website, however updated information for 2019 will not be available online for a few weeks.
  8. After teaching in Germany for 6 summers, I have come to the conclusion that the words “German” and “pizza” should never be used in the same sentence.
  9. Things you learn teaching Comparative Constitutional Law: the first two words of the German Constitution are “human dignity,”  while the U.S. Constitution did not originally mention human rights at all.
  10. Did I mention that an Orientation Session will take place Thursday September 6 at 12:15 pm in Room 257 of the Law School?

 

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Emoluments, Textualism and Original Intent

A wooden judge's gavel lies atop of a copy of the United States Constitution.The ongoing refusal of President Donald Trump to both reveal the specifics of his personal finances and to decline any income from sources outside of his official salary as President has brought renewed attention to the Emoluments Clauses of the United States Constitution.  There are two such clauses, which state as follows:

The Foreign Emoluments Clause prohibits any “Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State,” absent “the Consent of the Congress.” U.S. Const. art. I, §9, cl. 8.  The Domestic Emoluments Clause entitles the President to receive a salary while in office and forbids him from “receiv[ing] within that Period any other Emolument from the United States, or any of them.” U.S. Const. art. II, §1, cl. 7.
The meaning of these two provisions has become the subject of public debate and also litigation.  In one leading case, the State of Maryland and the District of Colombia have sued Donald Trump for violating these constitutional provisions.  They are suing for declaratory and injunctive relief which would compel President Trump to comply with the terms of the Constitution.
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Violent Crime Versus Property Crime: Law School Poll Reveals Notable Differences in Public Opinion

Public opinion polls typically find a preference for tougher treatment of defendants in the criminal-justice system. However, few polls attempt to disaggregate types of crime. When laypeople are asked what they think should be done with “criminals,” their responses are likely based on the relatively unusual violent and sexual offenses that dominate media coverage of crime. However, punitive attitudes toward such offenses may not necessarily indicate that similar attitudes prevail more generally.

In order to develop a better understanding of the extent to which public attitudes differ based on crime type, I collaborated with Professor Darren Wheelock of the Marquette Social and Cultural Sciences Department on a set of questions in the most recent Marquette Law School Poll. Rather than asking respondents about crime in general, we posed questions regarding violent crime and property crime. Our results were consistent with the expectation that members of the public see these two types of crime in a rather different light.

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