Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

ECtHR Hearing: Detention of Former Ukrainian Prime Minister

Post author:Anna High
Post published:August 29, 2012
Post category:International Law & Diplomacy Public

The European Court of Human Rights yesterday began a public hearing in the case of Tymoshenko v. Ukraine (application no. 49872/11), concerning complaints related to the detention of the former Ukrainian Prime Minister. The hearing preceded today’s verdict by the Higher Specialized Court of Ukraine for civil and criminal cases, which controversially upheld Tymoshenko’s conviction and imprisonment.

Tymoshenko was the Prime Minister of Ukraine from January to September 2005 and from December 2007 to March 2010. She was an instrumental figure in the Ukraine’s “Orange Revolution”, one of the democratic “Color Revolutions” to sweep former USSR and Balkan states during the early 2000s. An economist and academic, prior to embarking on a political career, Tymoshenko was a prominent and influential businesswoman in the gas industry.

Maraniss: Finding New Insights in the Personal Roots of President Obama

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:August 29, 2012
Post category:Public Speakers at Marquette

There were points in researching his new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, when David Maraniss says he was struck by the obvious but profound thought of how amazing the personal story of the current President of the United States is.

In an “On the Issues” session Wednesday with Mike Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy, Maraniss discussed his extraordinarily deep research into the family roots and early life of Obama, touching upon episodes and influences that would not conventionally be associated with a path to the presidency. The suicide of a great-grandmother. An absent father with alcohol problems who abused wives. Several years as a child in Indonesia, living in modest circumstances. A period in Obama’s youth where his two major interests were basketball and marijuana.

Maraniss contrasted the two presidents who have been the subject of high critically-acclaimed biographies that he wrote: Bill Clinton, “who was running for president from the day he was born basically,” and Obama, who “showed no inclination to what he was to become.” Maraniss said he stood in the neighborhood where the elementary-school age Obama lived in Jakarta, Indonesia, and was hit by the thought of “that incredible journey” from there to the White House.

Why Milwaukee’s Parking Enforcement System Might Be Unconstitutional

Post author:Ryan Scoville
Post published:August 27, 2012
Post category:Constitutional Law Milwaukee Public Seventh Circuit

When it comes to parking enforcement, the City of Milwaukee has a problem. Local media have concluded from interviews and public records that the City issues parking tickets without paying close attention to whether they are warranted. In 2011 alone, the City reportedly canceled over 38,000 parking tickets, often because they were plainly unjustified. Nearly 8,000 tickets, for example, were issued for “expired” parking meters that in fact had not expired. Given personal experience, I have little doubt that these figures are accurate.

The extremely high number of unwarranted tickets is not an accident. Instead, it appears to be the result of a policy to issue tickets indiscriminately for the singular purpose of revenue enhancement. The City’s manager for parking enforcement practically admits as much; he recently told a local news station that the policy “is to issue the citation and straighten it out later.” Media coverage suggests that the City implements this policy through an informal quota system: Several employees of the Department of Public Works have revealed that supervisors expect enforcement personnel to issue certain numbers of tickets per shift for specified areas, and that supervisors punish those who fail to meet quotas by handing out undesirable shift hours. In other words, enforcement personnel are under the gun; unless they want to work at 3:00 in the morning, they have to issue bushels of tickets. Because this system appears to give credit even for unjustified citations, there is little incentive for personnel to make sure that they issue citations only when deserved. So the high error rate is no surprise. The effect is to impose upon thousands of law-abiding residents the burden of either paying a fine or establishing the absence of a violation. For many, the hassle is worse than the dollar value of the fine.