Alumni Magazine for the University of Wisconsin Law School
The aching anxiety that followed Stewart Macaulay for years became sorrowfully real as he switched on a short-wave radio just before dinner at his rented home in Santiago, Chile. A newsreader for the BBC was describing how, hours before, a van packed with fertilizer and fuel oil had blown up, ripping through UW–Madison’s Sterling Hall …
Rick Raemisch’s Mission to Reform Solitary Confinement by Tammy Kempfert On January 23, 2014, Rick Raemisch ’88 was led, handcuffed and shackled, to a solitary confinement cell in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Inmates can wind up in solitary for a variety of reasons — anything from getting caught with contraband to fighting with another inmate …
By Tammy Kempfert In Madison, antiwar activism runs deep, with a tradition dating back to Law School graduate Robert La Follette and his strong opposition to entering World War I. But as protests go, no era was more turbulent than the 1960s, when UW–Madison students got national attention for their resistance to U.S. involvement in …
December, 2015 The television streaming service Netflix begins promoting a documentary series about a Wisconsin man wrongfully convicted of rape, released from prison, and then charged and convicted for the death of a young photographer. Keith Findley isn’t sure how long it took viewers of Making a Murderer to react — maybe a few days, …
By Nicole Sweeny Etter On election day, you duck into the poll booth with a ballot to record your voting preferences (that is, if you’re among the roughly half of eligible voters who bother to vote even during US presidential elections). Maybe you donate to a favorite candidate or political party. Perhaps you’re one of …
After completing his bachelor’s degree at Morehouse College, the all-male, historically black liberal arts school in Atlanta, Everett Mitchell considered staying in the South. Then he read a speech by the late Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. describing a vision for a “beloved community.” As King saw it, the beloved community is not only a …
Add Obergefell v. Hodges to the roster of historic US Supreme Court cases that current and future University of Wisconsin Law School students will dissect as they study the SupremeCourt and civil rights. The 5–4 decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the United States made headlines around the world and continues to ignite debate about what …
Aissa Olivarez first absorbed the Tony Robinson news after she had settled her baby girl back down after her regular 4 a.m. feeding. In the dim, morning hours of March 6, 2015, as she was scrolling tiredly through the predawn news, there it was: another unarmed, 19-year-old African- American man — somebody’s baby — shot …
Interview compiled and edited by Tammy Kempfert Having a conversation with Cody Splitt, a 1949 UW Law School graduate, is the next best thing to scoring a front-row seat to some of 20th-century America’s most pivotal moments. A gifted storyteller, Splitt speaks in vivid detail about growing up in Wausau, Wisconsin, during the Great Depression. She can …
By Nicole Sweeney Etter For years, statistics have painted a bleak picture of the fallout of lawyer burnout. And with that burnout, research shows that attorneys have alarmingly high rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, and suicide. The groundwork is often laid during law school, with national studies showing that about 40 percent of law …