An Interview with Professor Edward Fallone

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

Professor Edward Fallone is a graduate of Boston University, where he majored in Spanish Language & Literature. He holds a J.D. from Boston University. Following law school, he was an associate at a Washington, D.C. law firm where he practiced corporate law and white collar crime. He joined the Marquette faculty in 1992. He has also taught international criminal law at the Marquette summer law programs at the University of Brisbane and Justus Liebig University Law School in Giessen, Germany. His current research interests involve issues of constitutional interpretation and judicial methods. In addition to his work at the Law School, he is of counsel at a Milwaukee law firm and has held leadership roles in Milwaukee’s Hispanic and immigrant community.

Question: How did you become interested in law and teaching law?

Oddly enough, I became interested in law teaching because I absolutely hated one of my law professors. I was very interested in Corporate Law, and I found the class readings on insider trading and hostile takeovers to be fascinating. But my professor in that course was extremely boring, and he taught mostly by reading the teacher’s manual out loud to the class. I remember sitting in that class and thinking to myself, “I could do a better job than him.” Of course, nowadays when I am teaching a class I often look out over the faces of my students and I wonder if any of them are thinking the same thing.

Question: What do you most enjoy about teaching law students?

I like being in the classroom. I have never considered teaching to be a one way conduit of information. In my opinion, a class discussion can be just like an intelligent conversation over dinner, and it can be just as entertaining (without the wine, however). When a class goes well, the topics of the conversation can be wide-ranging and unexpected. If the students are prepared for class and engaged, then I have fun. Of course, this doesn’t happen every class period. Sometimes a particular subject matter lends itself to a more one-sided lecture format. Sometimes the students are unprepared. However, there are enough good days to make the job rewarding.

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Reviewing John Nichols’ Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street

What is it that is swelling the ranks of the dissatisfied?  Is it a growing conviction in state after state, that we are fast being dominated by forces that thwart the will of the people and menace representative government?

Robert M. LaFollette, July 4, 1897, Mineral Point, Wis.

With that quote, John Nichols begins the first chapter of his unapologetically biased book Uprising:  How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street (2012). Nichols, The Nation’s Washington correspondent and an associate editor of Madison’s Capital Times newspaper, recounts the protests in Madison and around the state in early 2011 and analyzes their importance in renewing a spirit of protest that spread from Madison to, ultimately, Manhattan.

Just as Nichols is not an unbiased author, I am not an unbiased reader. What Nichols writes about brings back vivid memories of weekends around the capitol square, in sun as well as in snow and cold, as part of the massive, diverse, palpably energetic crowds that marched around the square in February and March 2011.  Uprising is not a chronological account of the protests; rather, Nichols organizes thematically, beginning with the beginning:  the cold mid-February day, one day after Governor Scott Walker announced his 144-page budget repair bill that contained provisions that went far beyond repairing the budget to stripping collective bargaining rights of public employees.  On that day, Nichols says, fifty members of UW Madison’s Teaching Assistants’ Association (TAA) gathered in front of UW Madison’s Memorial Union and protested (4).  Two days later, Nichols tells us, more than 1,000 TAA members marched to the capitol. They were joined each day thereafter by hundreds and then thousands of others from all walks of life – union and non-union members, public and private employees alike – and they continued marching.

How and why what fifty or so students started became an incredible historical event is chronicled in Nichols’ subsequent chapters. 

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