Marquette Moot Court Team Success at the Leroy R. Hassell, Sr. National Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition

Please congratulate third-year law students Brittany Kachingwe and Kerri Puig, whose brief took second place at the Leroy R. Hassell, Sr. National Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition in Virginia. The team was advised by Professor Jacob Carpenter and coached by Attorneys Jennifer Severino and Joel Urmanski. Please also congratulate third-year students David Herring and Jessica Shank for their performance in the competition.  They were advised by Professor Susan Bay and coached by Attorneys Nick Cerwin and Chad Wozniak.  Both teams were also coached by third-year student Patrick Leigl. The competition this year included 19 teams.

The issues were 1) whether the President has the authority under the Recess Appointments Clause to make both intra- and inter-recess session appointments, and 2) whether a state action exists where a compulsory fee agreement arises under the National Labor Relations Act.  The United States Supreme Court is deciding the first issue this term.

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Pulitzer Winner Calls for News Reporting Focused on Solutions

Solutions journalism – what’s that? A leading advocate for this approach to news reporting told an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” audience in Eckstein Hall on Wednesday that it was, at the same time, a simple concept and an important change from the historic practices of most news organizations.

“The reigning myth of journalism is that we cover problems, and that’s all we do,” said Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network. ”The solution to the problem is not our business, someone else will come and take care of that.”

But, she said, “That model has failed. It’s not a good model for helping society learn what it needs to improve itself, which is what the purpose of journalism should be. Our view is that it is a perfectly legitimate part of journalism to cover, in addition to problems, what is going on to respond to those problem.”

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A History of the Mug Shot

Al Capone mugshotSome of the very earliest photographs from the late 1830s are of alleged and/or convicted criminals, and law enforcement officials used photographs of criminals in Belgium as early as the 1840s to track down wrong-doers.  In Paris, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police Office originated the “mug shot” as we usually imagine it — two shots side by side, with one shot being a frontal shot and the other being a profile.

This so-called “Bertillon System” was displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and it quickly caught on with American urban police departments.  It was an age of science, and some thought of the mug shot as a useful component in “scientific law enforcement.”  Indeed, there are surviving efforts by police departments to superimpose photographs of certain types of criminals on top of one another.   We could then, theoretically, have distilled images of, to note only two of many possibilities, the typical pickpocket or typical forger.

In the present, mug shots are still with us, but we now live in an era in which the market rather than science is seen by many as our savior.  It is possible to round up mug shots from public records and post them regardless of whether the pictured individuals have been prosecuted and/or convicted. 

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