Reflections of a 3L, Installment Two: Fieldwork and Clinics are Indisputably Indispensable

Casebook reading got you down?  Tired of briefing pretend issues for pretend clients?  Wish you’d never heard of Socrates or his dubious method?

Have I got news for you!  Now for the low, low (HA!) price of your already-paid tuition, you can learn about the law through real life experience.

I don’t mean to denigrate the value of our classroom legal education.  It is, of course, of vital importance to our growing legal knowledge and our ability to think about the law.  However, I am of the opinion that no legal education is complete without a foray into the wide world of the real-life practice of law.  For me, Marquette’s well-developed clinic and fieldwork selections were a large part of why I chose to come here.  I remember talking to Professor Hammer on the phone while making my where-to-go decision, just to check that all the clinic experiences listed on the website were real.  He assured me that, not only are they real, but that students who participate in them do real legal work for real clients.

In spite of my pre-law school enthusiasm about fieldwork, after my first two semesters, I became fearful if I left the confines of Sensenbrenner Hall, some sort of apocalypse would ensue.  At the end of my 1L year, I asked a 2L friend about the advisability of taking a clinic in my second year.  I was worried that taking on another responsibility would take away from my classroom performance and keep me from getting as much as I could from my classroom learning.  She told me that without her clinic experiences, her classroom experiences would have been less meaningful.  She couldn’t have been more right.

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Seventh Circuit Week in Review: Sentencing Thought Crimes

The Seventh Circuit had four new opinions in criminal cases last week.  Two dealt with sentencing, one with interrogation, and one with a search.  I’ll cover the cases in that order.

In United States v. England (No. 08-2440), the defendant was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm.  While being held pending trial, England learned that his brother-in-law Robert was cooperating with the police.  In telephone conversations with his father (which were apparently recorded by the police), England expressed feelings of violent rage against the brother-in-law, saying at one point, “[G]o relay a message to Robert [that if he] shows up to court, when I walk outta prison in fifteen years, I’m ‘onna [expletive] murder his [expletive].” 

After being convicted of the original charge, plus three new obstruction-of-justice types of charges, England was sentenced to 262 months in prison.  An earlier appeal and remand for resentencing resulted in a new sentence of 210 months.  Curiously, along the way, the sentencing judge “found” that England would have committed the crime of attempted murder of Robert or one of the other witnesses had he not been in custody before trial.  Indeed, this finding seemed to play a determinative role in the selection of a sentence.  From the standpoint of substantive criminal law, this was a strange move.  As the sentencing judge acknowledged, England took no “substantial step” — in fact, no step of any kind — towards the accomplishment of the murder that he supposedly intended.  There is a sense, then, in which England was punished based on little more than evil thoughts.  And, as any first-year law student will tell you, it is black-letter criminal law that you cannot be punished for thoughts alone.

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My Effort at a Half-Court Shot, or the Importance of a Faculty Blog

Years ago, before I arrived at the Law School in 1997, the annual student-faculty basketball game concluded on a dramatic note. My colleague, Professor Michael McChrystal, was fouled as time expired, with the faculty trailing by 2 points. There being essentially no time left on the clock, the court was cleared as Prof. McChrystal went to the foul line. He calmly sank both foul shots, sending the game into overtime, where the faculty proceeded to win. Prof. McChrystal has had the good sense never to play in the game again. (I once asked his daughter whether she had ever heard the story, and she allowed that it had come up on more than one occasion.)

This past Thursday evening saw this year’s game between the students and the faculty (the latter term being used loosely, as, happily, there are several other personnel who play on the faculty side). I declined the invitation to play, as I have in each instance since arriving in 1997, on a rather straightforward cost-benefit calculus. But I attended, of course, and even suggested to Tonya Turchik and Andy Shiffman, our Student Bar Association leaders, that I would do a half-court shot at half-time.

When half-time came, I took off my suit coat, put on my Opus hard hat (for no real reason, and certainly not, as one colleague suggested, because I feared that the ball would come back down on my head), and went to half-court. Professor Peter Rofes, in handing me the ball, asked which way I wanted to shoot; I suggested the direction in which all the fans (gathered at one end) could best see the whole thing. I would later learn that he and another colleague had a bet on the precise way in which I would miss the shot.

With little fanfare, I took the ball, bounced it several times, and shot it into the air from half-court. What would be the result?

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