A New Approach to Interpreting the Wisconsin Constitution?

In the most recent edition of the Yale Law Journal, Professor Abbe Gluck observes a phenomenon unique to state supreme courts: precedents that bind courts’ interpretive methods. At the U.S. Supreme Court, justices constantly argue about the proper method for interpreting contractual, regulatory, statutory, and constitutional texts. Prof. Gluck observes that in some state courts, including Wisconsin, a single case definitely sets the method by which future judges will interpret legal texts.

The Wisconsin case she refers to is, of course, State ex rel. Kalal v. Dane County Circuit Court (2004), which set a method by which the court would interpret statutes. That method focuses first on the text of the statute, and circumscribes the use of legislative history and other secondary sources.

Another Wisconsin case Prof. Gluck could mention is Buse v. Smith (1976), decided nearly thirty years before Kalal. 

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Negotiation Advice from an International Arbitrator

Last week, I was delighted to welcome Lucy Reed, a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and co-chair of their international arbitration group as our inaugural speaker for our speakers series on Gender & Negotiation, funded by the University Centennial Celebration Fund to celebrate 100 years of women at Marquette.  Lucy has an amazing background in both the private and public sector.  She has served as a Commissioner of the Ethiopia-Eritrea Claims Commission and co-director of the Claims Resolution Tribunal for Dormant Accounts in Switzerland.  She was the U.S. Agent to the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal and also general counsel of the Korean Pennisula Energy Development Organization (the organization negotiating with North Korea over its nuclear plants.)  Her private sector work currently focuses on investment treaty arbitrations and other public international law disputes. 

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Best of the Blogs Part II: Drugs, Immigration, and the Hotel “Death Ray”

If that title doesn’t increase readership of my posts, I don’t know what will.

My contribution this week to our “best of the blogs” feature (which I have taken license to interpret as “best of the blogs and other news read online…”) is even more random than usual.

First, the drug-related story that caught my eye in the relatively recent past.  The Daily Beast Cheat Sheet reported on September 27th about a Cato Institute study showing that since Portugal decriminalized drug possession in 2001, drug use among adolescents has fallen, HIV infection rates fell, and addicts have increasingly sought help to overcome their addictions.  The full story was in Time, here. An excerpt:

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