Don’t Forget the Small Towns

It is a commonly held belief among law students that practicing law in a small town is boring and not sufficiently rewarding from a financial standpoint.

That simply is not true.

A really good lawyer will do well almost any place. If you are not going to strive to be a really good lawyer, you won’t do well any place.

If you go to a small town to practice you will be surprised, if you have patience, just what you will find.

For 43 years I have practiced in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, a town of about 45,000. For most of that time the majority of my practice was business law with an emphasis on mergers and acquisitions, but I also did a fair amount of estate planning and real estate. After my first five years of practice, this is all that I did. 

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New Student Scholarship Discusses Conditional Resignations by Federal Judges and Patentability of Genes

Allison Luczak has published a new student comment in the Law Review on conditional resignations by federal judges. According to Luczak, conditional resignations – resignations of judges that are expressly conditioned upon certain terms or events such as the appointment of a successor by the President then in office – reflect the increased politicization of the appointments process. Although the power to submit a conditional resignation can be viewed as an aspect of life tenure, which in turn preserves judicial independence, Luczak points out that it may also subvert separation of powers because certain conditions may encroach upon the Executive and Legislative Branches’ powers of nomination and confirmation. Her comment discusses both the possibility of unconstitutional conditions and potential regulatory mechanisms to curb abuses.

The new issue of the Law Review also features a note by Ying Pan on the patentability of genes. Pan argues that although tens of thousands of gene patents have been granted over the past two decades, the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in KSR Int’l Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. should have the effect of limiting the future patentability of genes based on the requirement of nonobviousness. The note concludes with a set of proposed criteria that would bring the USPTO’s examination guidelines for gene patents into compliance with KSR.

Both of these pieces can be accessed at the Law Review’s website.

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Bad Omens for Wisconsin in the Race to the Top

The U.S. Department of Education is expected to announce by the end of this week the finalists for the Race to the Top grants that have been dominating national talk about education lately. Forty states, plus the District of Columbia, put in proposals to get some of the huge pie of $4.35 billion to be awarded for the what federal officials conclude are the most potent proposals for raising achievement in schools and cities where results until now have been poor.

Don’t expect Wisconsin to be among those tapped to move into the next stage of the first round of grants.  

At least two national bloggers who keep eyes on the process made predictions this week on who will stay in the running, and neither picked Wisconsin. Bloggers on the widely-read Education Week Web page picked Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Illinois, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, and Colorado as finalists, and projected Florida, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Tennessee, as the states that would get first round grants that could run to $100 million or more.

Thomas W. Carroll, who blogs for the City Journal Web site, picked seven states as the most likely to win shares of the Race to the Top money. They are Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Colorado, Georgia, Delaware and Michigan.

There will be a second round of grants later this year, but Wisconsin is not likely to be in the center of contention then either, unless something happens that makes the state’s proposal appear like it’s going to change the status quo in more dramatic ways than the current proposal suggests.

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