Don’t Be Afraid to Go to Law School, Minority Students Told

Lovell Johnson recalls a guy he looked up to in high school, a guy he thought could really succeed in life. Several years later, he ran into the guy. The guy was driving a cab. Nothing wrong with driving a cab, Johnson said as he counted the anecdote. But the guy said to him he could have gone to law school and made more of himself. And he didn’t.

Johnson decided he didn’t want to be like that guy. That guy was afraid to apply to law school; he was afraid to fail. So was Johnson. But Johnson overcame that, took the plunge, became a lawyer, and has been a well-known and successful Milwaukee County assistant district attorney for years.

“Don’t be afraid,” Johnson told about 150 Milwaukee high school students Thursday at a Youth Law Day conference at Eckstein Hall. “Don’t let anybody tell you you can’t do it.”

That was one of the strong underlying themes as the students from a half dozen schools got a dose of knowledge about what it’s like to be a lawyer and a lot of encouragement to pursue that possibility.

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The Problem with Wisconsin’s Parental Power of Attorney Law

Late last year, the Wisconsin legislature passed Wisconsin Statute section 48.979, which allows parents to delegate their parental rights to third parties by simply filling out a “Parental Power of Attorney” (PPOA) form.

Section 48.979 essentially allows parents with legal custody of their children to designate any third-party adult with nearly full decision-making power over a child’s life. What troubles me about this new law is that it does not allow for any oversight.

Section 48.979 requires absolutely no court or child protective services approval for PPOAs. I would imagine that some parents who might use a PPOA are people who have some difficulties in their own lives and, in turn, in raising their children. There is a long-standing Constitutional presumption that parents know what is in the best interest of their children and will act accordingly. Should we take that Constitutional presumption to mean that parents who might not be able to adequately care for their children should have the power to decide with whom their children should be placed and who should make decisions about their lives?

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In Praise of Flip-Floppers (Part II)

In my last post I scrutinized the tendency for contemporary political discourse to use the pejorative term “flip-flop” to refer to virtually any change of position by a candidate for public office. I argued that this usage uncritically discounts the possibility that some position changes are not only entirely justified, but should, if anything, improve our perception of a candidate, and that the likely effects are excessive cynicism and an exaggerated sense of the value of consistency. In this post, I want to add one more argument to the critique: contemporary usage is also problematic because it tends to attack position changes without regard for the public office the candidate seeks, and thus fails to appreciate how the particular constitutional function of the office might make a candidate’s shifts more or less problematic.

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