What’s New in the Classroom: On the Issues
This semester I taught a terrific group of students in my Legislation class. We had engaging and thought-provoking discussions about the legislative process and statutory interpretation. Indeed, some of those discussions continue on this Blog with some of my students participating in the on-line discussion about judicial activism.
As part of the class, I required my students to attend a number of the “On the Issues” programs hosted by our Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Law, Mike Gousha (see http://law.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/site.pl?on-the-issues/index for a list of the sessions from this semester along with corresponding podcasts). My reasoning for doing so, as I explained to my students, was to help them connect the material we learned about and discussed in class to real-world examples that impact us in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and nationally. And after each “On the Issues,” we had fruitful discussions about what the guest speakers said and how that related to the topics we grappled with in class.