Appointment of Russ Feingold

The University has announced today that Russell D. Feingold will join us as Visiting Professor of Law. In addition to noting this announcement, I wish to elaborate briefly upon my decision to appoint Sen. Feingold.

Let me begin with his background. Sen. Feingold is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a former Rhodes Scholar, and an honors law graduate of both Oxford University and Harvard University. He practiced law for six years with two leading Wisconsin law firms, Foley & Lardner and LaFollette & Sinykin. Sen. Feingold served for ten years in the Wisconsin Senate and eighteen years in the United States Senate, with the latter service concluding earlier this week, after his loss in the November election. He is known for his studious approach to the complex issues before the United States Senate, and particularly before the Senate’s select committee on intelligence and committees on the budget, foreign relations, and the judiciary. Sen. Feingold’s expertise and experience in a range of important legal fields will provide the basis for an upper-level elective course, Current Legal Issues: The U.S. Senate, which he will teach in the spring semester at the Law School. In addition to his teaching, Sen. Feingold will be working on a book concerning issues of the day.

On topics ranging from financing of political campaigns to civil liberties in an age of international terrorism to America’s engagement in Afghanistan, Sen. Feingold has been forthright, thoughtful, and independent. While I do not doubt that some of his views are controversial, or, still less, suggest that all of them are right, an institution of legal education is especially well suited to explore multiple dimensions of such issues. Thus, I believe that Sen. Feingold is almost uniquely well-positioned to contribute to discussion of numerous legal issues at Marquette Law School, through both teaching and writing. This is especially so because, throughout my discussions with Sen. Feingold, I was impressed with the commitment and seriousness with which he approached the role of professor. I am grateful that he will be with us for a time. I hope that you will join me in welcoming Professor Feingold.

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Recommended Legal Writing Reads from Judge Easterbrook

This past October, as a Judicial Intern at the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, I had the pleasure of attending an informal, reoccurring brown bag lunch held among the court’s clerks. We gathered in a conference room down the hall from the Dirksen Federal Building’s second-floor cafeteria to hear this session’s guest speaker—Chief Judge Frank H. Easterbrook—lecture informally on legal writing. The judge shared some of his experiences (e.g., his decision-making process*) and his must-read books for legal writers.

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Whatever Happened to the Underclass?

Those of us whose political memories extend back before the Clinton Administration — and I am still in denial that this is not true for many of my students — may recall a time when the plight of the urban poor seemed a major preoccupation of mainstream journalists and politicians.  I suppose there were even some echoes of this concern as recently as the “No Child Left Behind” phase of the second Bush presidency.  On the whole, though, it has seemed to me that the urban poor have received steadily decreasing attention in our political culture for many years.

Now I get some confirmation and explanation of these impressions in a new paper by David Papke, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Underclass’: An Exploration of Ideology and the Legal Arena.”  David is particularly interested in the notion of the “underclass,” a common term two decades ago that has since fallen out of use.  Had it retained a more robust place in our political discourse, David suggests that this sort of class conceptualization might have contributed to the political mobilization of the urban poor.  In his view, the displacement of the “underclass” in our national consciousness reflects “a resurgence of the dominant ideology’s traditional emphasis on the individual” (28) — a resurgence that served the interests of the socially powerful by drowning out the social criticism associated with the development of the underclass as an ideological construct.

David’s paper thus provides an interesting counterpoint to a recent paper by Matt Parlow that I blogged about here.  

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