Looking Back at Restorative Justice in Indian Country—A Conference of the Law School’s Andrew Center for Restorative Justice

Restorative Justice in Indian CountryThis year’s restorative justice conference was special—not only because a late-winter snowstorm seemed to have no effect on attendance, but also because it was the first annual conference to be hosted by the newly created Andrew Center for Restorative Justice at Marquette University Law School.

The theme for this year’s annual restorative justice conference, under the leadership of Ret. Justice Janine Geske, was Restorative Justice in Indian Country: Speaking the Truth, Instilling Accountability, and Working Toward Healing. With Native American Heritage Month now concluded, the Andrew Center would like to reflect on and draw attention to the continuing importance of our 2023 conference.

As part of this year’s conference, Justice Geske ensured that the wisdom, traditions, and voices of Native Americans would guide the conference organizing and planning. She received important early support from Marquette University’s Council on Native American Affairs. In addition, Jacqueline Schram, Director of Public Affairs and Special Assistant for Native American Affairs in the university’s Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, among others, was instrumental in the conference’s success.

The conference began with a Flag Ceremony by the Mohican Veterans and a Drum Ceremony, as a sign of thanksgiving and welcome. The conference also featured speakers including Shannon Holsey, President of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians, as well as JoAnn B. Jayne, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation. This year’s conference presented several panel discussions, which included Native American legal experts and educators who spoke and answered questions about harms suffered by Indigenous Peoples in the United States, Indigenous restorative justice practices, and restorative justice within Native American tribal law and the emergence of restorative justice within the U.S. legal system.

Perhaps more importantly, the Andrew Center hoped to encourage reflection about what restorative justice is and is not, and how it ought to be practiced in a way that is respectful to participants and the cultural ancestors of the practice. An excellent guide about restorative justice came from one of the panelists, Mark Denning, a cultural speaker and educator. “What does restorative justice look like?” asked Denning. “Victims are the focus; the harm that occurred is the second focus, and the focus on how to go about repairing that harm,” he answered. Denning also offered a contemplative question, asking: “But what’s the model: restore to what? What was it before harm was done?”

As we at the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice continue to learn more about the Indigenous roots of restorative justice, we also strive for our homepage to be a place where all may come to do the same. And so as Native American Heritage Month draws to a close, we invite you to visit our page, and to watch this year’s annual conference.

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What’s Luck Got to Do with It?

It’s December 2012. I’m a 2L. I’m on my way to take my Federal Jurisdiction exam and meet what I think to be my fate, when I run into a well-intentioned faculty member. He asks me where I’m heading. “To my Fed. Jur. exam,” I manage to get out. His response? “Yikes. Tough class. Well . . . good luck!”

If there’s an inauspicious way to kick off an exam, I’m pretty sure that’s it. 

Fast forward two summers: I had graduated from law school, and my entire life had become about (1) studying for the bar exam, (2) not overdrawing my checking account, and (3) Chipotle burritos. Left and right, people were wishing me good luck on the bar. Every time they did so, the pressure mounted, as did my conviction that my professional future rode entirely on either luck or some God-given ability—neither of which I felt particularly flush with at the time. From these experiences, I began to think “good luck”—even when offered with utmost sincerity—might not the best way to send someone into a high-pressure moment.[i]

But we all do it. We say “good luck” to friends before they start a trial or to students before they take an exam because we wish them well. Behind the two simple words, though, seems the implication that we are mere pawns, our fate left to the caprice of the gods. Luck’s sister concepts are, after all, fortune and chance.[ii] Expounding on the etymology of luck, University of Cambridge Professor Robert S. C. Gordon has written that the word’s etymological roots imply that “[l]uck, good luck at least, brings happiness . . . , and this much seems uncontroversial. But conversely, there is already a more sombre . . . implicitly secular philosophy embedded in this lexical chain . . . : happiness is a matter of pure luck, and the path from one to the other is steeped in doubt.”[iii] In other words, the notion of good luck—or the wish of it—might just imply that our happiness, our success is out of our hands.

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Crossover voting is uncommon, even in Wisconsin’s wide-open primaries

In some states, only officially registered members are allowed to vote in a party’s primary. Not so in Wisconsin, which lacks any kind of party registration and where voters can choose to cast a ballot in whichever primary they please. They must pick only one, but all the party primaries—Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Green, etc.—are all printed on a single ballot.

The main argument for closed primaries is that they prevent crossover voting, particularly party raiding. Party raiding refers to members of a different party disingenuously casting ballots in another party’s primary, thereby thwarting the will of the target party’s actual members.

Despite these fears, existing research shows that crossover voting is uncommon. When it does happen, it’s usually “simply because [crossover voters] prefer those candidates to the candidates offered in their own party’s primary, or they view their own party primary as a foregone conclusion and want the best possible set of candidates to choose from in the general election.” Deliberate party raiding, almost never matters.

Wisconsin is a good place to measure crossover voting, since our election system offers no obstacles to voters doing this. Data from the Marquette Law School Poll is consistent with the existing research showing little-to-no meaningful amount of crossover voting. I last wrote about this in 2019. Here is an update.

Because there are so few crossover voters, I pooled several survey waves preceding each election to calculate the following statistics. I don’t include statistics from the 2022 primary because we didn’t intended primary participation in a comparable way.

The April 2016 primary vote in Wisconsin was still contested among both Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls. In surveys leading up to that election, about 2% of self-identified Republicans and 3% of Democrats told us they planned to vote in the other party’s primary.

Similarly, the 2018 August partisan primary featured a competitive gubernatorial contest between Democrats and a contested Senate primary among Republicans. Less than 2% of the self-reported members of either party planned to crossover to the other party’s primary.

In both 2016 and 2018, the shares of each party planning to vote in the other primary were statistically indiscernible. That’s not true of 2020, when clearly more Republicans voted in the Democratic presidential primary than vice versa. This isn’t surprising, given that the Democratic presidential primary was competitive, while the Republican primary to renominate incumbent Donald Trump was a formality.

Across the six survey waves we fielded preceding the 2020 primary, we found that about 5% of Republicans planned to vote in the Democratic primary, compared to just 2% of Democrats planning to vote in the Republican primary.

plot showing the proportion of each party's voters planning to vote in the other party's primary

It would be a mistake to assume that these crossover voters are engaging in strategic “party raiding.” It’s more likely that the small numbers of voters who identify with one party but choose to switch primaries are expressing a sincere preference between the other party’s candidates.

In the graph below, I’ve pooled the responses across all three primaries, 2016, 2018, and 2020. For both Democrats and Republicans, I calculate their average self-described ideology on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “very conservative” and 5 is “very liberal.”

Democrats who plan to vote in the Republican party are noticeably more conservative than Democrats who are staying in their own primary. Likewise, Republicans crossing to the Democratic party are less conservative than Republicans staying in their own primary.

The average self-reported ideology of Republican and Democratic primary crossover voters are so similar to each other that they are statistically indistinguishable in this sample.

plot showing the average self-reported ideology by preferred primary

In 2020, slightly more Republicans intended to be crossover voters than Democrats, presumably because the Democratic presidential primary was more interesting. Depending on the outcomes from the first series of state primaries, the situation may be reversed in 2024.

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