Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Kearney Recognized as “Lawyer of the Year”

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 14, 2011
Post category:Marquette Law School

The Milwaukee Bar Association recognized our own Dean Joseph D. Kearney as “Lawyer of the Year” at its annual meeting earlier today. In presenting the award, MBA President Michael J. Cohen particularly cited Kearney’s ambitious vision for Eckstein Hall and his leadership in bringing that vision to life. Cohen noted that our new facility will serve as a valuable resource for many years to come, not only for our students, but also for the wider legal community.

In accepting the award, Kearney connected the Law School’s activities in Eckstein Hall to the ideal of the lawyer as a public citizen:

The greatness of the legal profession lies not only in its practitioners’ primary activities—doing deals, righting wrongs, protecting freedoms—but also in their other pursuits. The lawyer is, frequently at least, a public citizen, keeping his or her eye on the public good.

The effort of and in Eckstein Hall concerns all aspects of the profession, including an attention to the public good even beyond the development of future lawyers.

Marquette Law Review Article Sparks Debate on Use of Dictionaries to Decide Legal Cases

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:June 14, 2011
Post category:Judges & Judicial Process Legal Scholarship Marquette Law School U.S. Supreme Court

A recent article in the Marquette Law Review was featured in Adam Liptak’s “Sidebar” column for the New York Times earlier this week. Liptak wrote about the increasingly common citation of dictionaries in Supreme Court opinions:

A new study in The Marquette Law Review found that the justices had used dictionaries to define 295 words or phrases in 225 opinions in the 10 years starting in October 2000. That is roughly in line with the previous decade but an explosion by historical standards. In the 1960s, for instance, the court relied on dictionaries to define 23 terms in 16 opinions.

Liptak notes various objections to the practice. For instance, dictionaries were not written for the purpose of supplying precise legal definitions, and the variety of different meanings suggested by the many available dictionaries creates opportunities for “cherry picking.” He adds,

The authors of the Marquette study, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier and Samuel A. Thumma, said the justices had never really said precisely what dictionary definitions were doing in legal opinions. They urged the justices to explain “when and how dictionaries should be used, how a specific dictionary should be chosen and how to use a dictionary for interpretation.”

Pension Concessions Request Puts MPS Union in an Unhappy Place

Post author:Alan J. Borsuk
Post published:June 13, 2011
Post category:Education & Law Milwaukee Milwaukee Public Schools Public

The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, the union for Milwaukee Public Schools teachers, had two lines of defense against making concessions as the financial squeeze on MPS tightened.

The first was that, due to langauge in the bill backed by Gov. Scott Walker and Republican legislators, if the MTEA agreed to any changes in its contract, which goes through June 2013, the entire contract would be wiped out. The second was that the union had already made concessions when it settled in September 2010 and just wasn’t going to make any more.

The first line of defense stands to be erased in the light of changes made by the legislature’s joint finance committee that would allow the MPS contract to be changed without bringing down the roof.

And the Milwaukee School Board, as described ina Journal Sentinel story, put the question squarely to the union last week of whether it is going to stick by the second response. The board asked that the union to agree to have teachers pay 5.8% of their salaries toward their pensions. Although that is technically the way the system works now (with MPS paying a matching amount), MPS and many other school districts have paid both shares of the pension payments for many years.