Alumni Magazine for the University of Wisconsin Law School
2017 marks the 50th birthday of two UW Law School icons. Launched in 1967, the Legal Education Opportunities Program has logged 50 years as a national model for recruiting and retaining students of color. Commonly known as LEO, the trailblazing program has graduated more than 1,500 attorneys, who actively serve their legal communities in a …
While scanning the National Registry of Exonerations, Wisconsin Innocence Project attorney Cristina Bordé noticed some striking statistics. The number of Caucasian and African American inmates exonerated for wrongful convictions matched or exceeded the percentage of those groups in prison, while Latino or Hispanic exonerees were vastly underrepresented: they accounted for only 12 percent of exonerees …
Dan Cornelius ’09 is familiar with the challenges and opportunities of launching a business on tribal land: he founded the Mobile Farmers Market to help Native farmers, ranchers, food producers, and other entrepreneurs get their products from remote reservations to bigger markets. “Our tribes have entrepreneurs, but we could have so many more,” says Cornelius, …
Cecelia Klingele, on judges using software that measures criminal defendants’ risk of reoffending in their sentencing decisions: “We know that on average, these algorithmic tools tend to make better risk predictions than people do. People tend to overestimate risk. And so these can be a nice check against those natural intuitive biases that we have …
Six UW Law students spent spring break providing pro bono legal services for immigrants apprehended at the US–Mexico border. The immigrants are women and children who came to the United States seeking protection from violence in their home countries. By the time they arrived at the federal detention center in Dilley, Texas, where they are …
John Steuart Curry’s iconic mural, “The Freeing of the Slaves,” has provided quiet inspiration to generations of University of Wisconsin law students. The mural, which dominates the Law Library’s Quarles & Brady Reading Room, turns 75 this year. Completed in July 1942, the mural was commissioned to adorn the “new” Law Library reading room built …
The Supreme Court will decide whether Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature violated the Constitution by redrawing voter district maps that were unfairly partisan. The outcome could shape elections throughout the country. Professor Bill Whitford is the named plaintiff in the US Supreme Court case Gill v. Whitford. Widely considered the most important gerrymandering case in decades, it …
Professor Keith Findley and Wisconsin Innocence Project exoneree Jarrett Adams were featured on NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt for their work to free the wrongfully convicted. To watch the segment, visit NBC’s website. It’s Official: Members of UW Law’s graduating class of 2017 are admitted to practice the law during the June swearing-in …
See also “Mississippi Learning: The Education of Geraldine Hines ’71“ 1947 Born in the Mississippi Delta on October 29, 1947, Geraldine Hines knew early on she’d make a career of social justice lawyering. “Seeing what happened to my parents, what happened to people around me, the indignities we all faced — having to enter through …
UW Law School mourns the loss of Daniel O. Bernstine.