Marquette Law Professor and CAS Arbitrator Matt Mitten Helps Resolve First Legal Dispute at the Sochi Winter Olympics

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Professor Matt Mitten was one of three members of a Court of Arbitration for Sport panel that was called upon to resolve the first legal dispute to arise at the 2014 Winter Olympics. Along with fellow arbitrators Patrick Lafranchi of Switzerland and Robert Decary of Canada, Professor Mitten denied the claim of Austrian skier Daniela Bauer that she had been improperly excluded from the Austrian Olympic team.

The decision was handed down in Sochi. Bauer filed her claim on February 2, and the matter was heard by the Ad Hoc panel on the evening of February 3, with a final decision handed down at 1 p.m. (local time) on February 4.

A full account of the proceedings can be found here.

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The Fragility of Strads

266x180xlipinski-strad-300x204_jpg_pagespeed_ic_-vowBH2CskBravo to the Milwaukee Police Department and everybody who cooperated to ensure the safe return of the Lipinski Stradivarius! What an impressive feat.  The recovery of the violin ends several days of anxious speculation about the violin’s fate. Was it still in Milwaukee, as former FBI officer Robert Wittman (founder of the FBI’s National Art Crime Team) believed? Or in a vault of an extremely wealthy and unscrupulous person in a remote country, perhaps side by side with the missing Vermeer painting “The Concert”? Did these robbers know what they were doing or were they a group of blundering amateurs—and which of the two would be more favorable?

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To Split or Not to Split: That Is the Question

HamletOne of my former students, Sean Samis, sent me this blog about split infinitives. The infinitive version of a verb is “to __” (to run, to speak, to write, etc.). To split the infinitive refers to placing an adverb between the “to” and the rest of the verb. The example often given is from Star Trek: “to boldly go . . .” Boldly is the adverb splitting the infinitive “to go.”

The article recounts a story about diplomatic negotiations between the U.S. and Great Britain that led to the Treaty of 1871. As the story goes, the British conceded certain points to the U.S. in the treaty, but would not allow the language of the treaty to contain any split infinitives. According to Yale Professor Thomas Lounsbury, as quoted in the blog, the British sent a telegraph that the treaty’s wording “’would under no circumstances endure the insertion of an adverb between the preposition to (the sign of the infinitive) and the verb.’” Professor Lounsbury was recalling the treaty in 1904.

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