Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Information About Legal Writing Competitions…and a Shameless Plug for a Nice Fall Photo I Took in DC.

Post author:Jessica E. Slavin
Post published:November 26, 2008
Post category:Legal Education Legal Writing

I learned at yesterday’s faculty meeting that our Director of Student Affairs, Andrew Faltin, is maintaining a list of legal writing competitions on the law school web site. You can find it here. If you are a student, why not go check it out? A number of Marquette students have won prizes in these competitions.

You may also want to become a reader of the Legal Writing Competitions blog maintained by Kathryn Sampson at the University of Arkansas School of Law. It is thorough, and frequently updated. Another nice feature of that blog is that Kathryn includes nice photos with most of her posts. For instance, in her recent post about a tax-related competition, for which the prize includes a trip to DC, Kathryn includes a photo I took when I was in DC for a conference. (The conference was fantastic, and I still want to post about it, but I have not found the time yet.)

Appreciating Our Professors: The Georgetown Experimental Curriculum

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:November 25, 2008
Post category:Legal Education

As much as I would like to single out one person who had the most influence during my law school experience at Georgetown, like Kali Murray, I am going to break the rules here a little bit.

The greatest influence on me was, in fact, the course of study that I chose to pursue in my first year of law school. While most 1L’s take the traditional torts, contracts, property, etc., I was treated to a different group of classes that included: Bargain, Exchange & Liability; Property in Time; and Democracy & Coercion, to name a few. In addition, I took a small 1L Seminar on the different schools of legal thought (Critical Race Theory, Legal Process, Law & Economics), as well as a jurisprudence class called Legal Theory (where we read books like Anthony Kronman’s Lost Lawyer and Ronald Dworkin’s Law’s Empire).

All of these classes were part of the Section 3 experimental curriculum at Georgetown Law, which was created by a forward-looking group of professors who challenged the normal way of teaching law to students. The group who taught me in this experimental curriculum included many luminaries: Mark Tushnet (Government Processes), Wendy Perdue (Process), Mike Seidman (Democracy & Coercion and 1L Seminar), Dennis Patterson (visiting that year) (Legal Theory), Mike Gottesman (Bargain, Exchange & Liability), and Dan Ernst (Property in Time).

The combined Section 3 experience had a peculiar way of binding together not only the students who took this curriculum, but also the professors and students.

Blevins on the EFCA

Post author:Paul M. Secunda
Post published:November 25, 2008
Post category:Labor & Employment Law

John Blevins (South Texas) had an opinion piece supporting the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in the Houston Chronicle this past Saturday.

Here’s a taste:

The EFCA . . . would provide employees with an alternate method of creating a recognized union — the “card check.” When a majority of employees signs a card supporting self-organization, a union is formed that the employer is required to recognize. (Card check is allowed under current law, but employers are free to ignore it).

[Joseph] Gagnon’s[, who previously against the EFCA in the same paper] critique of the EFCA is a familiar one, and it goes something like this: By permitting card check, the EFCA would undermine the “truly free” choice that secret-ballot elections provide.

Without the secret ballot, union organizers would allegedly be free to coerce their fellow employees.

In fact, this critique featured prominently in a recent (and absurd) employer-sponsored ad campaign featuring a Sopranos actor posing as a mob boss pressuring employees. Fortunately for us all, the New Jersey crime families have yet to make significant inroads into our nation’s service industries. Sleep tight America.