Insights Offered on Working in the White House and Judicial Nomination Gridlock

 

It was three years from the time Brett Kavanaugh was nominated by President George W. Bush to be a federal appeals court judge to the time when his nomination was approved in 2006. That certainly gave him a first-hand look at the difficulties of getting a federal judicial nominee approved by the U.S. Senate.

“It’s been a mess for decades,” Kavanaugh, who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, said Wednesday during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program at Marquette Law School. Republicans have held up appointments by Democratic presidents. Democrats have help up appointments by Republican presidents.

Kavanaugh would not comment specifically on the current high-profile part of this recurring “mess,” in which President Barrack Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court has met a wall of Republican opposition in the Senate.

But Kavanaugh repeated a position he has held for years, one that was in line with the policy Bush advocated when he was president: “There really should be rules of the road agreed on by both parties ahead of time to fix the process. “ Kavanaugh said Bush, during his presidency, had suggested a policy in which nominations would get a vote in the Senate within 180 days. Kavanaugh supported that idea.

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Drone Law 101

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates that almost 2.5 million unmanned aerial systems, more commonly known as drones, will be purchased in 2016, and that annual sales will reach almost 7 million units by 2020.  Drones have been or soon will be employed in an ever-broadening dronesphere of applications, including photography, natural resource mapping and management, hobbyist flying, military and police applications, and perhaps even package delivery.  But as with many fast-emerging technologies, governance regimes have not kept pace with science.  As a result, many of these millions of purchasers have at least one thing in common: uncertainty over how their flying activities are regulated.

On Friday, April 8, the Environmental Law Society hosted a discussion of the future of drone regulation at the federal and state levels, featuring three experts: Russ Klingaman, who teaches Aviation Law and is a licensed pilot; Eric Compas, a UW-Whitewater professor and drone enthusiast who has received grant funding to investigate the use of drones for natural resource and disaster recovery purposes; and Detective Eric Draeger of the Milwaukee Police Department.  In a wide-ranging discussion, the panelists agreed that legal regimes governing drones are constantly evolving.  They grouped the top legal challenges related to drones into three categories: safety, privacy, and security.

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Congratulations to the 2016 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition Winners

Congratulations to the winners of the 2016 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition, Amardeep (Simi) Singh and Sara McNamara. Congratulations also go to finalists Samuel Draver and Alan Mazzulla, who additionally won the Franz C. Eschweiler Prize for Best Brief.  Simi Singh won the Ramon A. Klitzke Prize for Best Oralist.

The competitors argued before a large audience in the Appellate Courtroom. Presiding over the final round were Hon. Diane Sykes, Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, and Hon. Gary Feinerman.

Many thanks to the judges and competitors for their hard work, enthusiasm, and sportsmanship in all the rounds of competition, as well as to the moot court executive board and Law School administration and staff for their work in putting on the event. Special thanks to Dean Kearney for his support of the competition.  Thank you as well to the Moot Court Association for its work in putting this event together, and especially 3L executive board members Larissa Dallman and Andrew Otto.

Students are selected to participate in the competition based on their success in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy class at the Law School.

Here is a link to the final round video.

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