Appreciating Our Professors: James D. Ghiardi

My first experience with Professor James D. Ghiardi occurred in the fall of 1960 when I was a first year student at the Marquette Law School. I learned that Jim was my Torts teacher. Prior to that time I had never known any attorney. There were none in my family, and none of my friends had relatives who practiced law. I recall thinking in that first Torts class, if Jim was what being a lawyer was about, I had selected the right form of postgraduate education. He was the kind of lawyer I wanted to be.

At the inception, Jim made it clear to me and my fellow students that he was there not only to help us learn what Torts was all about, but also so that we learned to think, speak, and act like lawyers. We were not there to learn how to be philosophers, economists, sociologists, or political scientists. He also made it clear to all of us that knowing the elements of any particular Tort theory did a lawyer little good if he or she did not know how to prove those elements in court. What I experienced in that class made me want to take Jim’s other courses as well. It was very clear to anyone who cared to observe that Jim loved the law and what he was doing.

But Jim Ghiardi was much more than a law professor. He was and remains a dedicated husband, father, and now grandfather. He has served as President of the State Bar of Wisconsin. Election to that post speaks volumes about the respect he earned from lawyers in the state — even those who were not Marquette alums. He also served as a representative of the State’s bar in the ruling body of the American Bar Association. Jim loves sports, being a Marquette Basketball season ticket holder for as long as I can remember. Up until a few years ago he was also an avid golfer.

Several years after I graduated from the Law School, I felt a great deal of pride after making a presentation at a Wisconsin State Bar meeting. Thereafter, a member of the audience approached me and said that he was one of Jim’s former students. He then said that when he closed his eyes while listening to me he could have sworn that it was Jim making the presentation. High praise indeed.

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Supreme Court Takes Pass on NLRB Undocumented Workers Case

4united_states_supreme_court_112904 The United States Supreme Court decided yesterday to deny certiorari in an NLRB case concerning whether undocumented workers are considered employees under Section 2(3) of the NLRA. Both the NLRB and the D.C. Circuit found that they were in Agriprocessors v. NLRB. The issue about the status of the undocumented workers became important because the company refused to bargain with the union once it won the election because seventeen out of twenty-one employees were challenged as being in the United States illegally.

Agriprocessors, a company that specializes in the production of kosher meats, has also been in the news lately after the company was raided by the government based on the employment of a large number of undocumented workers and after its top officials were arrested for lying about its workers’ citizenship status.

This is an interesting case because it can be contrasted with the view that the Supreme Court took in the case of Hoffman Plastics, in which the Court held that undocumented workers who were illegally fired under the NLRA could not seek backpay.

Like everything else in this area of the overlap of immigration law and labor law, it is unlikely this is the last we have heard about this issue.

Cross posted at Workplace Prof Blog.

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“And He Causeth All, Both Small and Great, Rich and Poor, Free and Bond, to Receive a Mark”

So says Revelation 13:16. There are many interpretations of the wild events recounted in the Revelation to John. I am most familiar — and comfortable — with the view of the book as an allegory about persecution and redemption, but some folks think that it describes, in some more or less literal way, events that are still to occur.

I don’t know what the Amish view is but they — and certain other denominations — apparently read the text as calling for believers to resist receiving the forecast mark of the beast. This lawsuit, brought in federal court in Michigan, seeks relief from the federally sponsored program (voluntary for the states, but now adopted in Michigan) that requires the placing of RFID chips in cattle to facilitate the tracking of bovine and other livestock diseases. The plaintiffs make a variety of administrative law claims, as well as claims under the National Environmental Policy Act and the Fifth Amendment, but I’m interested in the claims made under the federal Religious Freedoms Restoration Act (RFRA) and a “supplemental” claim under the Michigan Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause. The requisite chips are claimed to require the plaintiffs to take the mark of the beast or to infringe their divinely ordained dominion over the cattle and all other living things. (Genesis 1:26-28.)

We know that the federal RFRA cannot be applied to the states. The plaintiffs try to get around that by arguing that Michigan is acting to implement federal law (and, it seems, receiving some type of federal grant in return for participation in the program, although the complaint is a bit unclear). If the feds are mandating this in some way as a condition of federal funding, then RFRA may apply.

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