Legal Community Mourns Justice Patrick Crooks

crooks-1170x781The Wisconsin legal community is mourning the sudden death of Justice N. Patrick Crooks.   A native of Green Bay, Wisconsin, Justice Crooks was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1996 and won a second term in 2006.  He recently announced that he would not stand for re-election in 2016.

Before joining the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Justice Crooks served as a Judge on the Brown County Circuit Court.  He was named Trial Judge of the Year in 1994 by the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates. He was widely respected as an independent and conscientious jurist.  He will be missed.

Photo Credit: Jake Harper/Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism

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New Article on Federal Courts and Customary International Law

I just posted a draft of a new article that studies citations in published judicial opinions to evaluate how federal courts go about ascertaining customary international law. For those interested, it’s forthcoming in the Iowa Law Review and available here.

Special thanks to Alex DeGuire and Ami Regele for excellent research assistance.

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Constitution Day Trivia Tidbits

constitutionSeptember 17 marks Constitution Day, the day in 1787 on which delegates to the Constitutional Convention signed the United States Constitution. Yesterday, the ABA Journal posted an interesting article to celebrate. The article contains 10 lesser-known facts about our Constitution, including these:

  • Most voters today would not have had the right to vote under the original Constitution. Voting rights were limited to propertied white males.
  • The word “God” never appears in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The source of all government power is in “the People.”
  • The word “democracy” never appears in the Constitution or Bill of Rights. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton claimed in the Federalist Papers that democracies were a disaster.
  • The First Amendment was not originally first. It started out as the third. For that matter, the Second Amendment was not originally the second. The original first and second amendments dealt with the size of Congress and with issues relating to Congress’s pay.

See here for the rest of the facts, and test your knowledge of the Constitution with the short quiz How well do you know the U.S. Constitution at the bottom of the page. It’s not as easy as you’d think! Next week, I’ll post on Professor Chad Oldfather’s interesting Constitution Day presentation on constitutional interpretation.

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