Community Justice in Wisconsin

I am looking forward to the Law School’s 2009 Public Service Conference, which will address “The Future of Community Justice in Wisconsin.”  Organized by our Assistant Dean for Public Service, Dan Idzikowski, the Conference will take place on Friday, February 20.  Dan has supplied the following post to explain the significance of “community justice” and why it is such an important topic today, particularly for anyone interested in the fairness and effectiveness of the criminal justice system:

Community justice councils, or criminal justice coordinating councils, have been established in several communities across Wisconsin. These councils bring together key local decision-makers to address the coordination, cost, and effectiveness of the criminal justice system in their area. Milwaukee County, which has the State’s largest concentration of offenders and criminal justice resources, recently established its own Community Justice Council. Remarkably, this council has brought together leadership across the political spectrum to address crime and corrections in the Milwaukee area. The Marquette Law School Public Service conference is designed to support this collaboration and bring together criminal justice experts to lend their counsel to these efforts. For example, Jeremy Travis, the keynote speaker, is the President of the preeminent John Jay School of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, the former director of the National Institute of Justice at the U.S. Justice Department, and the author of several books and studies on community corrections and reentry issues.

Why is community justice a critical public issue at this time? The past two decades have seen an explosion in Wisconsin’s prison and jail populations. Since 1990 over a dozen new state-operated correctional facilities were brought on line, and existing institutions were expanded. The cost of providing corrections services in Wisconsin grew from $178.4 million in 1990, to $583.4 million in 2000, to $1.2 billion in the current biennium.

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How Lawyers Write

This week’s faculty workshop presenter was our very own Professor Jessica Slavin, whose talk was entitled “Talking Back to IRAC: Legal Writing Beyond the Paradigm.” The project on which the talk was based has two components. First, Professor Slavin traced the history and questioned the utility of using IRAC and related formulas as vehicles for teaching legal writing. Second, she presented the results of her own empirical study of briefs submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which suggest that something other than strict adherence to IRAC characterizes the brief writing of at least one set of advocates.

To me, this is interesting and provocative stuff. I find the psychology of writing fascinating (put it together with the process of judging and I could maybe write a whole article about it). Having tried to teach a writing class once, I’ve experienced first hand just how difficult it is to articulate what makes for good writing. For me, at least, this is partly because I go about my own writing in a highly intuitive way. I don’t recall ever consistently thinking about IRAC when writing in a legal context, and I cannot articulate many of the rules of grammar (although I consciously violate some of the more ridiculous “rules,” such as the ones about split infinitives and prepositions at the end of sentences). Given all this, I share Professor Slavin’s sense that there’s something not quite right about a method of teaching writing that suggests that it is somehow a mechanical or rule-driven process. This is not (on my part, at least) to suggest that IRAC-like formulas are not useful, but rather that they are incomplete.

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War Stories

Yesterday, as part of our weekly faculty workshop series, we hosted Professor Julie Oseid of the University of St. Thomas. Her presentation was entitled “Show Me the Way: Mentoring Lawyers Through War Stories.” As the title suggests, her project is to consider, and to some extent justify, the use of war stories in legal education and more generally as a way to integrate new lawyers into the profession. Despite the fact that she was going head-to-head with Bud Selig, roughly twenty of our colleagues showed up to hear Julie’s thought-provoking talk.

For me, the topic ties in with some of the other discussions taking place on this blog, and elsewhere, concerning just how it is that we should go about the business of creating lawyers. I’m with Dean Strang in believing that technical proficiency is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition to being a good lawyer. Reflectiveness, judgment, and (this one is vastly underrated, in my view) creativity all have a role to play, along with some number of less tangible qualities.

Stories can help us pass along some of that information.

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