Public – Page 309 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Archbishop Explains the Pope’s Approach to Opposing Abortion

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:February 23, 2015
Post category:Public Religion & Law Speakers at Marquette

Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki says, “Until I die, I will be supportive of pro-life efforts.” But does he understand what Pope Francis meant when he said that the Catholic Church was obsessed with issues such as abortion?

Yes, he said, during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Eckstein Hall on Monday. The pope, he said, was not talking about the “rightness of the issue” and the church’s opposition to abortion. He was talking about how you spread the church’s message and bring people in.

Speaking of those who are particularly intent on the church’s fighting abortion, Listecki told Gousha, Marquette Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, “These are my friends. Do they sometimes give me heartburn? Yes, they do.” The way the church’s position is articulated by some can push people away, and that was what Pope Francis meant, the archbishop said.

Prisoner Enfranchisement in Ireland

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:February 20, 2015
Post category:Criminal Law & Process Election Law Human Rights Prisoner Rights Public

I was surprised to learn recently from an Irish law professor that Ireland gave its prisoners the right to vote in 2006. Felon disenfranchisement is such a pervasive fact of life in the United States that many Americans might assume, as I did, that this is the accepted practice everywhere. This turns out not to be the case. Ireland is hardly alone, even among the common-law countries, in giving prisoners the right to vote, although the case of Ireland may be unusual in that its legislature acted in the absence of a court directive. Canada and South Africa, by contrast, required court rulings before their prisoners were enfranchised. The Irish story is nicely recounted in an article by Cormac Behan and Ian O’Donnell: “Prisoners, Politics and the Polls: Enfranchisement and the Burden of Responsibility,” 48 Brit. J. Criminology 319 (2008).

Before proceeding with the Irish story, a little on the American situation:

Lighting Out for the Territories

Post author:Joseph A. Ranney
Post published:February 18, 2015
Post category:Legal History Public Wisconsin Law & Legal System

This is the second in a series of Schoone Fellowship Field Notes.

Territorial judges: an overlooked force in American law. As Willard Hurst observed, during the past 150 years lawyers have been implementers rather than creators of law. We whose days are spent staring at a screen and poring over paperwork sometimes wish we could take a way-back machine to the days of legal creationism, if only for a little while. Yet an important group of creators—judges appointed from Washington, starting in the 1780s, to establish the law in America’s far-flung, largely unsettled new territories—are nearly forgotten today. Territorial judges were often, in the words of the French observer Achille Murat, “the refuse of other tribunals” or seekers after sinecures, and if they are remembered at all it is as much for their escapades as for their jurisprudence. But some of the territorial judges, including Wisconsin’s James Doty, stand out in American political and legal history, and the vital contributions they made to institutionalizing American law are often overlooked. The book being written under the Schoone Fellowship’s auspices will attempt to remedy that.