What Must a Defendant Do in Order to Go It Alone?

While awaiting trial on criminal charges in federal court, Michael Campbell wrote the following in a letter to the judge:

Your honor I am asking that John Taylor [Campbell’s court-appointed lawyer] be removed from my case. I am requesting that you appoint another lawyer to complete the process. If not I would like to proceed pro se.

As my Criminal Procedure students have heard me discuss at length, defendants do indeed have a Sixth Amendment right to represent themselves.  Yet, Campbell’s request was not satisfied: Taylor continued to serve as his lawyer through the time of his trial and conviction.  Campbell then raised the issue on appeal, but the Seventh Circuit nonetheless affirmed his conviction earlier this week (United States v. Campbell (No. 10-3002)).  The court held, in effect, that Campbell should have renewed his request to go it alone, rather than sitting quietly throughout the trial as his lawyer continued to represent him.

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Mandatory Foreclosure Mediation: A Good Idea?

The Florida Supreme Court has ordered a review of its 18-month-old mandatory foreclosure mediation program.  Should a similar process come to Wisconsin?

In July 2011, Wisconsin had the 10th highest foreclosure rate in the United States, only four spots behind the State of Florida.  Several initiatives in Wisconsin have attempted to inject mediation into the foreclosure process, with varying amounts of success.  Purely voluntary processes are flailing – with lenders refusing across the board to even attend the voluntary mediations.  More suggestive processes are seeing varying amounts of success.

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Getting What You Pay For In Legal Education

[Editor’s Note: This month, we asked a few veteran faculty members to share their reflections on what has changed the most in legal education since they became law professors.  This is the sixth and final entry in the series.]

Legal education is no longer lean. When I was hired as Marquette Law School’s third administrator in 1975, the Law School had about a dozen full-time faculty members and three professional law librarians. These days, the Law School has a dozen administrators, forty or so full-time faculty, and more than a dozen professional librarians. The Law School facility is more than three times larger than when I started at the Law School. That enrollment is up some, from about 450 full-time students to about 600 full-time students and another 150 part-time students, accounts for only a fraction of the growth.

The principal change I’ve seen in my 35+ years at the Law School (I was an adolescent when first employed by Marquette) is this amazing growth in the resources and cost of legal education. Students are paying unprecedented amounts for a law school education and receiving access to unprecedented resources in return.

Some of the most important new resources and costs are those mentioned by my colleagues in this blog series.  

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