Skills Gap Holds Back Wisconsin’s Economy, Sullivan Says

Tim Sullivan has a simple definition of the skills gap in Wisconsin. “We have jobs available but no workers qualified to fill those jobs,” Sullivan told Mike Gousha, Marquette Law School’s Distinguished Fellow in Law and Public Policy, during an “On the Issues” session on Thursday. “Quite frankly, it stifles economic development.” Sullivan called the gap “probably the most important thing to kill economic development” in Wisconsin.

When Bucyrus International was sold in 2011 to Caterpillar, Sullivan, who had been CEO and president of the South Milwaukee-based industrial giant, came away in a good personal position. He could have chosen to leave the spotlight. He decided not to seek public office, despite encouragement to do so. But he did not walk away from his willingness to be involved in trying to close that skills gap and change other things that are hurting economic development in Milwaukee and Wisconsin.

Now an unpaid special consultant to Gov. Scott Walker on workforce development and education issues, Sullivan recently issued a report, “The Road Ahead: Restoring Wisconsin’s Workforce Development” that is likely to spur legislative proposals and changes on other fronts in coming months.

Describing what he found in compiling the report, Sullivan told the audience in Eckstein Hall’s Appellate Courtroom that there are more than 600 agencies in the state working on economic development which ought to be reduced to nine and that there is no one with a handle on reliable, up-to-the-minute data on available jobs in the state when software systems that can provide such information are being used elsewhere and can have large benefits.

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From the Inside Out—a Law Student’s Perspective

“The Law is full of phraseology drawn from morals, and by mere force of language continually invites us to pass from one domain to the other without perceiving it, as we are sure to do unless we have the boundary constantly before our minds.” 

 –Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., The Path of the Law

While writing my Honors Scholar Thesis my senior year at DePauw University, Justice Holmes’ words became the perfect frame for my interdisciplinary study of legal ethics. This quote was taken from an address from an 1897 Harvard Law Review, The Path of the Law, 10 Harv. L. Rev. 457, (1897), in which Holmes offers a piece of pragmatic wisdom to the practicing lawyer. In essence, the lawyer should assume the role of “the bad man” who is not concerned with principles of ethics, axioms and systematic reasoning. Instead, the lawyer should be concerned with self-interest, preservation, and the immediate consequences influencing one’s actions. From this perspective, the lawyer better positions himself to protect those interests that “the bad man” might have in predicting how the court will respond, given the facts and circumstances that surround a particular case. As a somewhat critical undergraduate student, I noted that this perspective makes broad, “questionable” assumptions about the client while offering a somewhat cynical philosophy for the role that the lawyer must play for a successful study and practice of law. The emphasis on practice and prediction is a hallmark of Holmes’ pragmatic view of the law with experience at the foundation.

Holmes represented a critical juncture in the theory and practice of law, drawing attention to the intellectual content of the law, reviving historical relationships between law, ethics, and practical wisdom. Holmes believed in demystifying the law, removing notions of omnipresent knowledge and appeals to “the infinite” in order to focus on practical application and reasonable prediction. As a philosophy student, with a focus in ethics and morality, I was never a fan of pragmatism. In fact, I was rather perturbed by Holmes’ candid admission. Nonetheless, I found Holmes’ position to be “reasonable” and incredibly helpful as I embarked on my interdisciplinary study of legal ethics, specifically focusing on the duty to protect client confidences.

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Is Law a Blue Profession?

In the current National Law Journal, Matthew Huisman reports that lawyers and law firms have donated significantly more money to Democrat President Barack Obama than they have to his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney. According to the records of the Federal Elections Commission, members of the legal profession have contributed $15.4m to Obama during the 2011-12 Presidential cycle while contributing only $6.8 million to Romney. Other Republican presidential aspirants received $2.1m.

The pattern in 2012 is essentially the same as in 2007 and 2008. In that election cycle lawyers contributed $46.5m to Barack Obama and $16.5m to Hilary Clinton, but gave only $10.4m to John McCain.

An earlier study of campaign contributions by law professors at the “Top 20” law schools between 1991 and 2002 conducted by Prof. John McGinnis of Northwestern University showed an equal imbalance. Of professors who donated to presidential candidates, 81% donated exclusively or primarily to Democratic candidates while only 15% donated exclusively or primarily to Republicans. The other 4% divided their donations between the two parties. At 18 of the 20 law schools surveyed Democratic donors predominated. At two (Northwestern and Virginia), the faculty was equally divided between Republicans and Democratic donors.

A similar survey conducted in 2008 of the faculty donations patterns at 17 law schools found that 93% of money donated by law professors to presidential candidates went to Democratic candidates. At Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, Stanford, Texas, UC-Berkeley and Pennsylvania no law professors donated to Republican candidates. Only at Northwestern did law professor donations to Republican candidates exceed those to Democrats. Vanderbilt, with 43.1%, had the second highest percentage of money donated to Republican candidates. Virginia, which showed up as one of the more Republican law schools in the McGinnis survey ranked 4th of 17 schools in percentage of donations going to Republican candidates, but its percentage was only 22.2%.

According to the Huffington Post’s Fundrace Database, only two Marquette Law professors contributed to presidential candidates in the last election cycle, and they split 50/50 between the parties.

 

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