Learning (At Last) to Value Water

welIn 1774, Ben Franklin said, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of the well.”

“He was wrong,” author Robert Glennon told an audience of about 100 Tuesday at the Alumni Memorial Union at Marquette University.  Even as  wells and water supplies move ominously closer to dry in parts of the United States, the public and many policy makers are not responding in ways that could avert major impacts, warned  Glennon, whose books include Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It, published last spring.

“We don’t value water in the United States,” Glennon told the session, part of the “On the Issues” series hosted by Mike Gousha, Marquette Law School Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy.

Wisconsin is not standing at the precipice of a water crisis to the same degree as  metropolitan Atlanta and much of the western United States, but it would still be wise to undertake public education efforts here and to make more effective water use decisions, Glennon said. 

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Constitutional View, Not Catholicism, Behind Scalia’s Opinions on Abortion

scaliaAs a Catholic whose views are in line with those of Pope Benedict XVI, US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia personally opposes abortion.

But what explains his opinions in every abortion-related case that has come to the court since Scalia became a justice in 1986 is not his Catholicism but his “originalist” interpretation of the US Constitution, the author of a new biography of Scalia said Monday.

Speaking at an “On the Issues” forum at Marquette Law School, Joan Biskupic told host Mike Gousha that Scalia has “parallel passions,” Catholicism and the law.

”You just cannot forget that he’s so darned conservative on the Constitution, independent of his Catholicism,“ Biskupic said. Scalia simply does not see anything in the text of the Constitution that supports giving a woman a right to have an abortion.

Biskupic said she found in researching Scalia’s life that his views on the Constitution have been consistent for all his adult life. People she talked to from each stage of his life described him as an originalist.

Biskupic described Scalia as a “many-layered” person.

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The Tierneys and the Law

nsliI had the opportunity last month to be involved in the presentation by our National Sports Law Institute of its Master of the Game Award. The NSLI has given out this award, over the years, to such distinguished individuals as Hank Aaron, Donna de Varona, Bob Harlan, Al McGuire, Bud Selig, and Bart Starr. This year the award was presented to the Tierney family, especially to recognize the contributions of the late Joseph E. Tierney, Jr., of our law class of 1941, and his wife, the late Mrs. Bernice Tierney. The Tierneys are an historic family at Marquette, with Joe Tierney “the first” having been a member of our law class of 1911. As dean, I had the privilege to get to know the late Mrs. Tierney before her death earlier this year. As I explained in my remarks at the NSLI’s luncheon where the award was presented, Mrs. Tierney possessed an unusual combination of intelligence, grace, conversational skills, wit, and good humor; truly she was a remarkable woman. The more impressive remarks, from my perspective, were those of Joseph E. Tierney, III, of our law class of 1966 (and of Meissner Tierney Fisher & Nichols), who recalled his parents—their involvement in the Law School and the sports law program in particular, to be sure, but more generally as well. As Joe noted in his closing, “To be masters of the game, it is important to identify the game. For both of them, the game was life.” Joe’s remarks, which touch eloquently in just a few words on such varied topics as law, sports, family, and filial piety and such individuals as Marty Greenberg and the late Chuck Mentkowski and Jane Bradley Pettit, are well worth reading.

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