The Continuing Story of a Strongly Divided Electorate

And in the end, we are at the point where we started – a state that is narrowly divided when it comes to the total number of people on each side of its politics and deeply divided when it comes to how strongly people feel about key issues.

That’s the way it was in 2011 and 2012 in the tumultuous events that led to a recall election for  governor. That’s the way it was in an analysis of voting patterns in Wisconsin, and especially in the Milwaukee area, by Craig Gilbert, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Washington Bureau chief, which was the cover story of the current Marquette Lawyer magazine. That’s what the Marquette Law School Poll showed at the start of 2014, as the run-up began to the election for governor, to be held on Tuesday.

And as Charles Franklin, professor of law and public policy and director of the Marquette Law School Poll, said Wednesday, that’s what the final pre-election results showed. Franklin spoke at the conclusion of the “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at which the last poll data prior to the Nov. 4 election was released.

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Casual Convergence in Unincorporated Entity Law

offices-at-night-smProfessor Nadelle Grossman has a forthcoming book chapter entitled “Casual Convergence in Unincorporated Entity Law” in the Research Handbook on Partnerships, LLCs and Alternative Forms of Business Organizations (Robert W. Hillman & Mark J. Loewenstein eds., Edward Elgar Publ’g forthcoming 2015).  The abstract is below. You can access Prof. Grossman’s full book chapter at SSRN.

As seemingly uniform as the surface of the sea, unincorporated entity acts in most states are drafted from one of the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Law’s (NCCUSL) uniform acts.  In fact, by the end of 2013, seven states had adopted NCCUSL’s latest uniform act governing limited liability companies (LLCs), called the Revised Uniform Limited Liability Company Act, or RULLCA, and more have since followed.

Supporters of uniformity, including NCCUSL, argue that uniformity among state LLC acts generates administrative and cost savings.  Critics, on the other hand, argue that uniformity undermines state experimentation to achieve more efficient LLC laws.

However, I argue in the chapter that these debates about uniformity are misguided. 

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An Interview with Professor Linda Edwards

faculty_lindaedwards2014-04This fall, Professor Linda Edwards joins Marquette Law School as the Robert F. Boden Visiting Professor of Law.  She is the E.L. Cord Foundation Professor of Law at UNLV.

You have written a wonderful book on the great briefs. What are some of your favorite briefs and why do you like them?

One of my favorites is the Petitioner’s brief in Miranda v. Arizona. Scholars, law teachers, and practitioners usually read judicial opinions rather than the briefs that produced those opinions. The Miranda brief is one of the few that has received attention in its own right. I took my turn to comment on it in Once Upon a Time in Law: Myth, Metaphor, and Authority, 77 Tenn. L. Rev. 885 (2010). Instead of a dry parsing of the cases, the argument section tells an engrossing story of the birth of the right to counsel. It’s also a story about the kind of people we want to be. It’s well-written too. In an era when lawyers tended to write in a boring, ponderous style, the Miranda brief is engaging and easy to read. It combines strong legal analysis, great policy arguments, and a passion for justice—a great example for us all.

Another of my favorites is the primary defense brief in the set of consolidated cases that came to be known as Furman v. Georgia. The primary brief challenging the death penalty for those cases was actually filed in Aikens v. California. The thing I like most about this brief is the daring choice it makes in the fact statement. It does not try to minimize the crimes or argue that the defendant was innocent or that his hard life provided an excuse for his actions. All of those would have been losing arguments. Instead, it admits that the crimes were horrendous and that the defendant probably did them, but it uses our human reaction to those killings to argue that state-imposed killing is little better. It was a risky argument, but it was honest and much better strategy than the alternatives. I really admire the courage and skill it took to pull it off.

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