Law School and Public Policy Forum Offer Web Site on Future of Cultural Assets

Set aside the hot subject of a new basketball arena for downtown Milwaukee – that’s a horse race that’s already far down the track – and we still face a lot of major policy questions about the future of the Milwaukee area’s cultural and recreational assets.

Museums, the zoo, parks, playgrounds, the convention center, cultural organizations– these are important assets to the community and keys to the overall quality of life of people living in and visiting the Milwaukee area.

What should do to keep them vibrant and how should we pay for what we do?

Marquette Law School and the Public Policy Forum, a non-partisan local research organization, are partnering in an effort to help educate people on the issues surrounding these important aspects of our community. The two institutions have created a Web-based tool for learning about the issues and developing your own thoughts on what should be done and how it might be financed.

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Legislative Diplomacy After Zivotofsky

The Supreme Court’s decision in Zivotofsky v. Kerry held that Congress violated the separation of powers by enacting a statute that purported to compel the President to issue statements that contradict his policy of strict neutrality on the status of Jerusalem. In a recent post, I analyzed a disagreement between the majority and the dissent on the significance of foreign perceptions of U.S. law. I’ve now written a second post on the case, this time exploring Zivotofsky‘s implications for the constitutionality of diplomatic communications between Congress and foreign governments. It’s available over at Lawfare.

 

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The Necessity of Revising

keep-calm-and-revise-11I had a student a couple of years ago who described herself as a “one-sit wonder.” That is, in all of her previous schooling, she was quite adept at pounding out a more than serviceable paper in one sitting. Once she arrived in law school, she realized that style of writing was probably not going to work. (And, to be fair, it probably shouldn’t work in any other setting, either, but I do realize that it’s the way most students do write.)

There’s rarely anyone who can pound out what should be considered “final copy” in one sitting. Really good writers realize that writing is a process; the point of that first draft is to give you something to revise. In the writing process, you should be leaving behind a trail of drafts, some of them quite rough, before you finally arrive at the polished final copy.

Why is it important—no, necessary—to revise?

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