How Did This Milwaukee House Change Property Law?

Come to the Boden Lecture and find out. Indeed, I encourage the Law School and the broader legal community to turn out in force for the lecture this coming Thursday, Sept. 23, at 4:30 p.m. in the Appellate Courtroom of Eckstein Hall. It will be delivered by Thomas W. Merrill, an especially distinguished legal academic (he is the Charles Evans Hughes Professor at Columbia Law School) and an outstanding lawyer (he has argued more than a dozen cases in the U.S. Supreme Court). The nature of Prof. Merrill’s topic should make the talk of interest to the broader community as well: it will provide a take on how Milwaukee’s industrial past has affected American property law. In particular, Prof. Merrill will discuss his original historical research concerning a well-known case from the late nineteenth century, which appears in first-year property textbooks: Melms v. Pabst Brewing Co. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s decision in Melms concerned the fate of part of the Philip Best Brewery site on the near-south side of Milwaukee (to which Captain Frederick Pabst had succeeded): parts of the plant still remain just west of 6th Street, along Virginia, barely more than a mile from the Law School, in what eventually became the Pfister & Vogel property. So there is a substantial local-history angle to the lecture as well. Let’s make the first Boden Lecture in Eckstein Hall a resounding success by supporting it; I know that Prof. Merrill will do his part by delivering an outstanding lecture. You can register here.

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Best of the Blogs: Trivial Pursuits Edition

This week’s review of blog postings and news stories of note focuses on subjects that might seem trivial, but that interest me nonetheless.

1. Comic Books

My brother and I had an extensive collection of comic books when we were growing up.  We even owned two (two!) mint editions of Conan the Barbarian number 1.  If I still owned that collection today, it would easily pay for the first year of my daughter’s college tuition.

After reaching the age of puberty, I consigned my childhood love of comic books to the “trivial” category of youthful pursuits.  Perhaps that is why I was so delighted to read about the current exhibit at the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale University, entitled Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books.  As described by John Schwartz in the New York Times, this exhibit includes comic books with a legal setting, contracts and correspondence relating to legal disputes over the ownership of comic book characters, and reports submitted to Congress during the 1950s seeking federal legislation to address the alleged connection between comic books and juvenile delinquency.

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Special Committee on Judicial Discipline and Recusal

One important, but perhaps underreported, development in our legal world is the work of the Legislature’s Special Committee on Judicial Discipline and Recusal. The committee grew out of a request from Justice Patrick Crooks for the legislature to consider amendments to statutes governing judicial discipline and disqualification. Both issues have been hot button items in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the wake of hotly contested and exceedingly well financed campaigns for seats on the Court in the 2007 and 2008 election cycles. The committee, consisting of legislators and public members, is charged with studying both issues and, if appropriate, make recommendations to the legislature.

Yesterday, I had the privilege of being one of nine invited guests to testify before the Committee. Four of the nine witnesses were sitting Justices on the Court – Chief Justice Abrahamson and Justices Bradley, Crooks and Roggensack. The hearing can be viewed here. I am the last (or as I would prefer to say “clean up”) witness.

Yesterday’s hearing had to do with recusal although some of the speakers addressed matters of discipline, largely addressing issues concerning the deadlock in the Gableman matter and how that might be avoided in the future. Much of the discussion on recusal centered on whether the legislature should adopt an objective standard (presumably other than, as I pointed out, the one announced in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.), how that standard should be enforced and what it should be.

More to follow.

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