Welcome to Jonathan Koenig

koenigI’m very pleased to announce that Marquette Law Adjunct Professor Jonathan Koenig will be writing a series of posts for the blog on two of his areas of interest, federal sentencing and supervised release, with the first post to come later this morning. Prof. Koenig is Appellate Division Chief in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. He has been a federal prosecutor for twelve years and argues frequently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. He currently teaches Appellate Writing and Advocacy.

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A Global Survey on the Study of International Law

In the United States, public international law is not an important part of legal education. By my count, only eight schools require their students to complete a course on the subject: Florida International, Harvard, Hofstra, UC-Irvine, Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, and Washington & Lee. Everywhere else, international law is purely elective. Insofar as relatively few students tend to choose this elective, we have a legal profession made up of individuals who lack formal training on topics like treaty interpretation, human rights law, and international organizations.

Is this common in other countries or another example of American exceptionalism? To answer that question, I conducted a global survey of the study of international law. The results, which are available in the form of an interactive world map at PILMap.org, show the frequency with which law schools and governments around the world require individuals to study public international law en route to obtaining a law degree. By clicking on individual states, you can look at summary statistics and details about the curricula of specific law schools.

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Why No “Good Time” in Wisconsin?

Unlike most other states, Wisconsin does not recognize prisoners’ good behavior with credits toward accelerated release.  Wisconsin had such a “good time” program for well over a century, but eliminated it as part of the policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s that collectively left the state unusually — perhaps even uniquely — inflexible in its terms of imprisonment.  I’ve been researching the history of good time in Wisconsin in connection with a forthcoming law review article.

Wisconsin adopted its first good time law in 1860, which placed it among the first states to embrace this new device for improving prison discipline.  Twenty years later, in 1880, the Legislature expanded good time and restructured the program in the form it would retain for about a century.  In the first year of imprisonment, an inmate could earn one month of credit for good behavior; in the second, two months; in the third, three; and so forth.  Credits maxed out at six months per year.   A model prisoner with a ten-year term, for instance, might earn enough credits to knock off nearly three years from the time served.

In Wisconsin and elsewhere, good time has had a distinct history, structure, and purpose from parole.  

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