Pro Bono and Public Interest Legal Work at Marquette

Friday was the 2014 Posner Exchange and Pro Bono Society Induction at the Law School.  The event honors law students who have achieved 50 or more hours of pro bono service while attending law school.  Special recognition is given to students who have achieved 120 or more hours. The Hon. Ramona E. Romero, the general counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture, was the speaker at this year’s event.  Congratulations to the honorees for starting their careers by including pro bono service in their work.

Recently I attended a panel presentation at the Law School on pro bono opportunities available to our law students.  I was so impressed by the opportunities that I am highlighting them here.  To qualify as pro bono, the work must be supervised by a licensed attorney, not for pay or credit, primarily legal in nature, and in the service of underserved populations–those with barriers to equal access to justice, or for an organization whose mission is to serve underserved populations.

Students gain valuable experience in client interviewing skills and accessing and completing forms, two practical skills that are difficult to convey in a classroom setting. Pro bono also gives students exposure to a variety of practice areas and opportunity to work alongside and be mentored by a cadre of more than 250 volunteer attorneys.

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Baldwin Points to Tax Issues for the Super-Rich as a Rising Issue

Could using tax policy to reduce the gaps between the highest income Americans and middle and lower income people be an important, and maybe hot, issue ahead?

Sen. Tammy Baldwin indicated that was her perspective and that she was open to ideas for using tax reform changes to pursue that goal during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program Wednesday at Eckstein Hall.

“We clearly have a system that has chosen, in certain policy decisions made, to reward wealth over work,” Baldwin said.  “I think we have to question a system that works that way.”

Baldwin said some other countries have policies that limit the maximum salaries of CEOs in relation to the salaries of their employees. “I don’t think we’re going to see those kind of initiatives” in the United States, she said. “But that leaves the tax code really as our predominant way of looking at this and understanding this. . . . That’s an issue we should think about.”

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Why Isn’t Aereo a Cable System?

Aereo tiny antennaThe Aereo case was argued this morning, and before Paul Clement could even get rolling on his introduction on behalf of the broadcaster plaintiffs, Justice Sotomayor hit him with this:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: Why aren’t [companies like Aereo] cable companies?

MR. CLEMENT: They’re not ­­–

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: I’m looking at the — everybody’s been arguing this case as if for sure they’re not. But I look at the definition of a cable company, and it seems to fit.

I’ve been wondering this too. The question presented in Aereo is whether Aereo is engaged in a “public performance” when its servers automatically save and transmit recorded broadcast television programs to subscribers at their request, or whether that activity is properly understood as only the users’ activity. (Scotusblog has a good backgrounder on the case.)

In debating that issue, both the broadcasters and Aereo have at separate points analogized Aereo to a cable system — the broadcasters in the course of claiming that Congress intended to define what Aereo is doing as a “public performance,” just as it did with cable retransmission; Aereo in claiming that it is engaged in disruptive innovation, just as the early cable operators did. But that raises a somewhat different question: why isn’t Aereo subject to Section 111 of the Copyright Act? If it is, then the Court could avoid the entire debate over public performances; the text of Section 111 provides a direct route to liability for certain retransmissions without even mentioning the words “public performance.” And yet, as far as I can tell, it has not been raised by the broadcaster plaintiffs as a basis for a preliminary injunction.

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