For those of you who list mastery of apostrophe usage with the rest of your New Year’s resolutions, here is a short primer:
1. Use an apostrophe to indicate possession.
2. Place the apostrophe before the “s” when referring to a singular entity. For example, “the dog’s food bowl is in the kitchen.” Or, “Karen’s house is on the right.”
The Seventeenth Annual Howard B. Eisenberg Do-Gooders’ (PILS) Auction will be held on Friday, February 12, from 5:30 to 9:00 p.m. at the Italian Conference Center at 631 East Chicago Street in Milwaukee.
The event, which is named after the late Dean Howard Eisenberg, raises funds for the Public Interest Law Society’s Summer Fellowship Program.
The silent auction begins at 5:30 p.m. Complimentary beer, wine, and soda will be served from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The live auction, MC’d by the very entertaining Professor Ed Fallone, will begin at 7:30 p.m. Appetizers and a light dinner will be served.
Tickets are $40 per person. Student tickets are $25 if purchased by February 9. Tickets may be purchased online or by check at www.law.marquette.edu, or may be purchased at the door. Tickets may also be purchased in the student lounge at the Law School. Special Fellowship and Do-Gooder tables are available.
This year’s auction features terrific live and silent auction items.
It is curious thing that, even as undergraduate liberal arts programs continue to take a beating, law schools designed to train professionals now offer more humanistic (sometimes called perspective) courses than ever. What may be even more curious is that the presence of these courses in the curriculum is justified on instrumental grounds. Courses in jurisprudence, legal history, and comparative law (as well as others taking their cue from the social sciences) provide, it is argued, a context for the understanding (and later exercise) of practical wisdom. The Hessian effect — the sense that the law teacher is there simply to train practically-minded mercenaries, see Thomas Bergin, The Law Teacher: A Man Divided Against Himself, 54 Va. L. Rev. 637 (1968) — remains present in legal education, but the definition of the training of lawyers has broadened to encompass such courses as integral to one’s legal education.
Part of this transformation results from the greater employment of legal academics who hold joint degrees in law and other disciplines, many of whom had little experience in practice. Part was a reaction against dogged resistance to “big ideas” about law in mid-twentieth century legal education, and part, I think, is due to a hunger in students for something more from their education than technocratic training.