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At the end of July, both Professor Michael Smith and I attended the Applied Legal Storytelling Conference at Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.  The conference was entitled “Chapter 2:  Once Upon a Legal Story” and focused on storytelling in “ways that will directly and tangibly benefit law students (i.e. future lawyers) and legal practitioners (i.e. former law students).”  The presentations I attended addressed ways to use storytelling to create a stronger narrative theme in a case and how to handle the ethical issues in storytelling. One of the most intriguing presentations was Professor Kenneth Chestek’s talk “Judging by the Numbers:  an Empirical Study of the Power of Story.”  Professor Chestek conducted a study where he wrote four fictional test briefs:  two that focused heavily on stating the law and applying it (the “pure logos” briefs), and two that focused on creating a narrative story into which the law was inserted and applied (the “story” briefs).  (He wrote a logos brief and a story brief for both the petitioner and respondent.)  Professor Chestek solicited appellate practitioners, appellate judges, appellate ... Read more..

63 Best Blogs: Taking You On A Journey Through Family Law and Life There are a lot of good blogs about divorce, parenting, life after divorce and more. The amount of information can be a little overwhelming, so Total Divorce compiled a list of the top 63 blogs that we think deserve special recognition. We don’t monitor the content of these blogs, but in our minds, these blogs are the best of the best and could be of interest to you. The blogs we choose covered topics in the following categories: Working Through Divorce Advice on Divorce and Relationships Single Parenting & Raising a Blended Family Children and Divorce Life after Divorce Divorce and Finances Divorce Networking Sites Congratulations to the winners! Thank you for doing what you do best and providing readers with some great material. Keep on blogging! Working Through Divorce Finding my Way. This blog has transformed from when the blogger separated from her husband in 2005, to where she is in her life today. The journey is a mixture of divorce, dating, finances, gardening, traveling and more. Learn something new or “laugh in recognition” while enjoying the beautiful pictures ... Read more..

Broward County Criminal Lawyer William Moore talks about violence and age. In general, when most people think of violent crimes or offenders, they think of young people, says Broward criminal lawyer William Moore. This is due to a combination of factors: television, the media, popular ideas about criminal gangs, personal experiences, and, yes, even reality. Young men tend to the be most likely demographic to engage in criminal behavior more generally, especially crimes like criminal mischief, assault, battery, and burglary. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss any possibility that a person will commit a crime due to his age, Fort Lauderdale criminal attorney Moore says. The recent murder-suicide of a Delray Beach couple has brought this fact to the attention of the public. In a state where many people come to retire and live out their last years on our sunny beaches, it is a topic worthy of discussion. Carl Sims was an 89-year-old man who had served on the Detroit police force for the bulk of his career, working as a patrolman from 1946 ... Read more..

Your faithful blog committee moderates posts and comments on  a rotating basis.  I was  ”on call” on Tuesday evening and, returning home in despair after a night at Miller Park,  inadvertently published posts by Professors Greipp and Papke under my own name. The mistake was fixed in the morning. But I found the latter error intriguing. Here I was, ostensibly the “author” of a post regretting “dominant ideological prescriptions related to, respectively, autonomous individualism and the bourgeois market economy.” It was as if someone had replaced my bedside Edmund Burke with Jean-Paul Sartre. But here’s the thing. I do agree – in a sense – with David’s point. If, in the terms David invokes, the author is part of a “collective subject “whose work is “trans-individual” in that it is permeated by others in its creation, then it seems equally probable that it is permeable in the ways in which it will be understood. This should be so quite apart from whether someone else appropriates parts of the work and turns it to a different purpose. (I once heard Rage Against the Machine used as part ... Read more..

Student organizations enrich a law student’s experience.  Whether it is bringing in practitioners to discuss the practice of law or bringing in scholars to debate important legal issues, student organizations—and the events they sponsor—help law students think about the law.  To be successful and to produce successful lawyers, a law school should encourage students to think about the law outside the classroom.  It is outside the classroom where a student may pursue the law in more depth and choose a topic that is important and interesting to him or her. Joining a student organization is a great way for a student to get involved while at Marquette Law School.  Joining gives a student the opportunity to become friends with other students who have similar interests, and it is a great way to meet lawyers and scholars in your field of interest.  In other words, it is a great way to network, which is so critical to becoming a successful lawyer.  Taking on a leadership role within a student organization gives students the opportunity to become leaders and earn the respect ... Read more..