Moot Court at Marquette

Moot court in 2012 certainly isn’t quite the same as it was for those of us in the Class of 1977. Indeed, moot court is as advanced and spectacularly nouveau as is Marquette Law’s remarkable new edifice: Eckstein Hall.

After five spinal fusion surgeries and two years in the Heart Transplant Program at the University of Miami Hospitals, I returned to MULS during late October 2011 to reconnect with my law school alma mater.

Dean Matt Parlow invited me to help Professor Melissa Greipp by using my 30 years of experience in appellate matters to coach MULS students in the national moot court teams. Professor Greipp welcomed me warmly, and this has been a most rewarding experience.

The positive, numerous expansions of the Marquette moot court program in 2012 are impressive. Permit me to compare briefly my experience in 1977 to the most recent 2012 Spong and Jenkins Honors Moot Court competitions.

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Jenkins Competitors Win 2012 Finals

Congratulations to the winners of the 2012 Jenkins Honors Moot Court Competition, Kristina Gordon and Sarah McNutt. Congratulations also go to finalists Ariane Strombom and Megan Zabkowicz.

Sarah McNutt won the Ramon A. Klitzke Prize for Best Oralist. Kristina Gordon and Sarah McNutt won the Franz C. Eschweiler Prize for Best Brief.

The competitors argued before a packed Appellate Courtroom, and the event was live-streamed into the Zilber Forum. 

Many thanks to the judges and competitors for their effort and enthusiasm in all the rounds of competition, as well as to the moot court executive board and Law School administration and staff for their work in putting on the event. Special thanks to Dean Kearney for his support of the competition.

Students are selected to participate in the competition based on their success in the fall Appellate Writing and Advocacy class at the Law School.

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Victim/Offender Mediation in Turkey

After a delegation of members of the Turkish Parliament visited Marquette Law School last month, I had the privilege of traveling to Istanbul to moderate a victim/offender mediation conference for two hundred fifty Turkish prosecutors and judges. There were fourteen of us restorative justice “experts” from ten different countries who were there for three days to talk to the ballroom full of lawyers, who wanted to learn how to best implement Turkey’s already enacted victim/offender mediation process during criminal prosecutions.  It was a fabulous experience.

The United Nations’ Development Programs for Judicial Reform organized and oversaw the planning of the conference. Because the panel members came from many countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Scotland, Spain, Turkey, and the United States), we had simultaneous translations of the conference into several languages. The Turkish audience was lively and eager to participate in the dialogue. Over the first two days we spent much of our time taking questions from the floor and answering them from the perspectives of different cultures, judicial systems and philosophies. The Turkish prosecutors and judges, like prosecutors and judges around the world, are working to improve the delivery of justice despite their significant caseloads. They hope that by using restorative processes that they can provide a more just system while reducing the number of cases that must go to trial.

I have a number of observations about the conference.

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