Restorative Justice Conference: Keeping the Victims Foremost

The eight-year-old who wasn’t there: That was one of the most important people involved in last week’s impressive two-day conference at Eckstein Hall on dealing with clergy sex abuse scandals.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Ireland, the Most Reverend Diarmuid Martin, brought the eight-year-old into the conference.

Of course, no children were literally present. But Archbishop Martin, who has attracted substantial international attention for his strong stands in the aftermath of large-scale scandals in Dublin, recounted how he had a bit of time before a program at a school he was visiting. The principal asked if there was anything he wanted to see. He said he wanted to visit a class of eight-year-olds.

The reason, he said, was that he wanted to look at their faces and underscore in his own mind their images. When people deal with issues related to the scandals, they tend to see the victims as the adults they are when what happened to them comes to light, the archbishop said. He said, “It is important to see the face of eight-year-old.”

When dealing with the issue of sex abuse, it is the images of the victims, both as children and adults, that should come to mind first, not the images of clergy members or the situation of the church overall, Martin said.

That was one of the key messages of the conference, “Harm, Hope, and Healing: International Dialogue on the Clergy Sex Scandal.” The sessions, the Law School’s annual Restorative Justice Initiative conference for this year, brought together experts from around the world and attracted wide attention, particularly in the Catholic press.

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Another Law Gone Wrong

I’m not sure if this meets the precise definition of a “law gone wrong,” but in my home state of Virginia it is illegal “to hunt or kill any wild bird or wild animal, including any nuisance species, with a gun, firearm or other weapon on Sunday, which is hereby declared a rest day for all species of wild bird and wild animal life.”

Although I was born into a family of church-going hunters, I was always more sympathetic to the church part than to the hunting part.  Consequently, I have no problem whatsoever with Sunday, or any other day for that matter, being declared a day of rest for wild animals (or at least a day on which they cannot be killed).

What I find peculiar (and wrong) is the statute’s one exception:  day of rest notwithstanding, raccoons can be hunted and killed in Virginia on Sundays, so long as the hunting is done between midnight and 2:00 a.m.  (I am not making this up.  If you doubt this, check out Va. Code § 29.1-521(A)(1).)

Because of their semi-domesticated qualities, especially when young, raccoons have always been my favorite wild animals.  But even without this affection, I would like to think that I would find it unfair, and  maybe even unconstitutional in some sublime sense, that one species of woodland animal would be deprived of 1/12 of its statutory day of rest.

Can such a classification purport to have a rational basis?  After Romer v. Evans and United States v. Virginia, I think not.

 

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Nathan Fishbach Honored—and the Law School, Too

Nathan Fishbach Nathan Fishbach, shareholder at Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, received the Eastern District of Wisconsin Bar Association’s Judge Myron L. Gordon Lifetime Achievement Award today. That itself might be worth recording in these annals (cf. Prof. Jessica Slavin’s blog post from two years ago concerning awards by the EDWBA to Michael O’Hear and Tom Shriner). For Nathan has been a member of our Advisory Board and otherwise a great friend of the Law School.

But permit me to note that the Law School was allowed to share in the honor in an important (and lasting) sense. For Nathan’s firm, Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, announced today that it will use the occasion of Nathan’s award to honor him by creating the Nathan Fishbach Student Development Fund at Marquette Law School. My role in this is small (being on the receiving end of a gift or saying “thank you, yes” is easy), but I wish to elaborate on this matter a bit.

Nathan is a highly skilled attorney, with extensive litigation experience on behalf of—and thus demands on his time from—the federal government, commercial interests, and private individuals. Yet even in the press of business, he has struck me with his interest and investment in the future of the profession. An important example of this was his work a decade ago in the founding of the Eastern District of the Wisconsin Bar Association.

Along these same lines, his interest in Marquette Law School has been especially outstanding. A graduate of Villanova Law School, Nathan has been a great champion of our students, speaking to classes, mentoring them individually, and taking the interest—and time—to work with them on their career development.

The Fishbach Fund, created at the Law School by Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek, will support our bringing in speakers, from Wisconsin and across the country (indeed, the world), whose experiences and counsel will help future law students gain a greater sense of the profession into which they are entering. It will also provide for programs, workshops, or other opportunities designed to promote a greater integration between Marquette law students and the profession. That we have been historically good at such integration means that this sort of gift should help us reach for greatness.

Thank you to Nathan for being an engaged exemplar over the years, and to the attorneys of Whyte Hirschboeck Dudek for their selecting Marquette Law School as the place to perpetuate Nathan’s honor.

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