An Interview with Professor Jack Kircher

[Editor’s Note: This blog is the third in a series of interviews with faculty and staff at the Law School.]

A member of the Law School faculty since 1970, Professor Kircher teaches torts, insurance, products liability, and seminars in advanced issues on torts. He received the Marquette University Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence in 1986 and the Marquette Law Review Editors’ Award in 1988. In 1993 he received the American Bar Association Tort and Insurance Practice Section’s Robert B. McKay Award for distinction in the teaching of torts and insurance law. Before coming to the Law School, he practiced law and subsequently was Research Director of the Defense Research Institute. He has chaired the Wisconsin Judicial Council and the Wisconsin Supreme Court Board of Bar Examiners. He is coauthor of Punitive Damages: Law and Practice. Professor Kircher is a member of the Editorial Board of the Defense Law Journal, and was Editor of the Federation of Defense & Corporate Counsel Quarterly.

Question:  How did you first become interested in insurance and tort law, and what do you find most intriguing about those areas of law?

My interest in the two subjects started in law school, most probably because they were taught by my favorite professor, Jim Ghiardi. It developed in my first three years after law school due to my work in a defense firm that handled cases in those two areas. It developed further and faster thereafter when Jim asked me to join him as his second-in-command at a legal think tank, the Defense Research Institute, that concentrated its work in those two areas. Also the two subjects are interesting to me because the law constantly changes. In fact, by the time I left the Law School the Wisconsin Supreme Court had changed about 25 percent of what I learned in first-year Torts. I would expect that most of the law I learned in my other courses has remained nearly the same.

Continue ReadingAn Interview with Professor Jack Kircher

What’s Next for the Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel?

I have a new article on SSRN that considers recent developments in the Supreme Court relating to effective assistance of counsel. Here’s the abstract:

This article considers the interplay between habeas corpus law and the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel. Certain peculiarities of federal habeas have given a schizophrenic character to recent Supreme Court decisions on ineffective assistance. At the same time that the Court has displayed a new willingness to extend Sixth Amendment protections to the plea-bargaining arena, the Court has also evinced a particular hostility to ineffective assistance claims arising in habeas. The present article identifies the roots of this schizophrenia in the Court’s 2000 decision in Williams v. Taylor. The Court’s trajectory from Williams to the present suggests that, absent a significant ideological makeover, the Court is unlikely in habeas cases to bring greater vigor and clarity to the right to effective assistance. The Court and advocates pushing the Court to adopt stronger Sixth Amendment protections should thus focus their efforts on cases emerging directly from state-court systems, rather than on collateral post-conviction challenges in federal court.

Continue ReadingWhat’s Next for the Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel?

2012 Annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law: The Accidental Crime Commission: Its Legacies and Lessons

On October 4, 2012 Professor Franklin E. Zimring delivered the Annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law to a large audience of interested public, law students, faculty, and members of the legal profession. Professor Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.

His subject was the origins and legacies of the so-called Wickersham Commission of 1929-1931. Since the Commission’s work is largely forgotten today, Professor Zimring assumed the burden of explaining how “this hopeless venture ended up being viewed as a precedent setting and positive contribution to the ways in which the national government learns about crime and criminal justice.” In this he succeeded, his remarks serving as a timely, thoughtful introduction to the Law School’s day-long conference on the Wickersham Commission that was held on October 5, 2012. (More on the conference in my next blog.)

Continue Reading2012 Annual George and Margaret Barrock Lecture on Criminal Law: The Accidental Crime Commission: Its Legacies and Lessons