Happy New Year! Our January guest blogger will be 2L Vanessa Richmond. Vanessa is from Chicago and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she is interested in commercial litigation, intellectual property, and media law. Many thanks to our previous guest, 3L Frank Remington.
Two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article entitled “A Steep Slide in Law School Enrollment Accelerates.” One of the major premises for the article was that prospective graduate school students have increasingly found law school not to be an attractive option anymore. According to the article, students likened their relationship to their schools as a business contract. The article was supported by ABA employment figures that showed that less than two-thirds of law school graduates found jobs that required passing the bar exam. I found the article and its premises unfair. The article, hardly the first to do so, equated law school success to finding long-term employment as a lawyer.
Grading a law school education based on bar-exam-required employment is unfairly simplistic. The breadth of interesting employment opportunities available to law school graduates is incredible.
The Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition is an appellate moot court competition for Marquette law students and the capstone event of the intramural moot court program. Students are invited to participate based on their top performance in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy course at the Law School.
Congratulations to the participants in the 2015 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition:
Lindsey Anderson
Samuel Casson
Larissa Dallman
Alexandra Don
Mary Ellis
Olivia Fitzgerald
Christopher Guthrie
Tyler Helsel
Nolan Jensen
Ian Kalis
Jeremy Klang
Christopher Little
Lauren Maddente
Daniel Murphy
Averi Niemuth
Andrew Otto
Alexander Perwich
Natalie Schiferl
Jacob Shapiro
Kyle Thelen
Nicole Ways
Bryan Whitehead
Students will begin writing their appellate briefs in January with the rounds of oral argument commencing later this spring. The competition includes preliminary oral argument rounds (March 21 and 22) and a semifinal (March 26) and final round (April 1).
The Jenkins competitors are fortunate to have the opportunity to argue before distinguished members of the bench and bar from Wisconsin and beyond.
The competition is named after the James G. Jenkins, the first Marquette Law School dean.