Wade H. McCree, Jr.

At Wade McCree\u27s funeral service in Detroit, Otis Smith introduced the many people who spoke. Mr. Smith reminded us that, when Wade ceased to be Solicitor General, he had many offers from law firms in Washington and New York. Wade, he said, turned the offers down and chose to remain in public service. When Mr. Smith made this statement, my first thought was, Wade didn\u27t stay in public service. He became a law professor. After all, for so many of us teachers, life is a wonderful self-indulgence, the opportunity to read and write just what we please. But, of course, for Wade, teaching in law school became simply the next stage of a full career in public service. He viewed it as an opportunity to instill in young women and men the importance of taking seriously their lives as lawyers and public servants; as an opportunity to give advice to students; and as an opportunity to speak widely across the nation on issues of public importance

For the Best of Friends and for Lovers of all Sorts, a Status Other than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners and the Legacy of Marvin v. Marvin)

American governments have recently begun to experiment with new familial statuses for gay male and lesbian couples, who have demanded the right to marry but have been appeased with more modest forms of recognition.4 What I propose here is quite different. It is a status for people who have close bonds but do not want to be married to each other. I call this status designated friends. Once registered, designated friends would obtain a limited number of privileges and undertake a limited number of responsibilities relating to the care for the other when ill or incapacitated or upon death, but would not receive any of the governmental financial benefits or undertake any of the financial responsibilities that attach to marriage. Gay male and lesbian couples would be among those eligible to register, but the premise of this proposal is that same-sex couples would also be permitted to marry.5 Same-sex couples who do not choose to marry would be eligible, like any other pair of unmarried adults, to register as designated friends if they wished

The First-Year Courses: What\u27s There and What\u27s Not

For many of you, law school will be a full-time occupation for three school years; for others, a second job squeezed in at night over four or five years. Whatever your route to a degree, whatever sort of law school you attend, the beginnings of law school are likely to be much the same. You will face initially a set of required courses that will probably bear the same titles as the titles of our next six chapters: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, Torts and Constitutional Law. The six are likely to be taught in ways that resemble each other on the surface. Each will have a casebook slightly heavier than a medicine ball. Each casebook will devote more pages to the decisions of courts of appeals than any other form of material, and your assignments will come almost entirely from the casebook. Your professors will have an arched eyebrow for every confident assertion a student makes, though they will probably be far less cold and crusty than the caricature of the film Paper Chase. They will lecture in varying degrees, but nearly all will call on students who have not volunteered, asking questions about the assigned cases and the issues they raise

Overstating the Satisfaction of Lawyers

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail to include the views of those who once worked in that setting but have now gone elsewhere; and third, that few studies address the problems of bias that may be caused by lower rates of response from the least satisfied persons in the population sampled

The Changing Student Body at the University of Michigan Law School

Most of the content of the memo that follows has been previously published in the article Who We Were and Who We Are: How Michigan Law Students Have Changed Since the 1950s: Findings from 40 Years of Alumni Surveys. T. K. Adams, co-author. Law Quad. Notes 51, no. 1 (2009): 74-80, available through this website. This memo provides more detail about changing entry credentials and about the great expansion beginning in the 1970s in the numbers of women students and of racial/ethnic minority students. It also provides information not in the article about the patterns over time in students’ parents’ occupations, in students’ education prior to law school, and in students’ political views when they entered law school

Foreword to Legalizing Gay Marriage

The significance and timeliness of Michael Mello’s book was brought home to me recently when I participated in a conference on same-sex marriage at Brigham Young University Law School in Provo, Utah. Nearly everyone in the audience opposed permitting two men or two women to marry each other. Many favored an amendment to the United States Constitution to prevent any state from permitting same-sex couples to marry. Most regretted the decision of the United States Supreme Court in June 2004 holding sodomy laws unconstitutional. To them, the institution of marriage was under siege. The welfare of unborn children was at risk. Same-sex unions, one speaker believed, would offend “the dignity of children.” Another speaker referred to the union of two men as “mere friendship, with the option of sodomy. My task at the conference was to discuss the developments in Vermont. I drew on Professor Mello’s manuscript and described the decision of the Vermont Supreme Court in the Baker case, the response of the Vermont legislature, and the responses of Vermont voters in the two elections that have followed. After I spoke, another member of the panel, a member of the Brigham Young faculty, delivered a short version of a 60-page law review article he had written appraising the Baker decision. He criticized the reasoning of the court and accused the justices of misusing their own precedents. He then went on at some length to point out that few appellate courts in other states had cited Baker in the nearly four years since it was decided. He never acknowledged that the absence of citations in other courts should be no surprise. After all, in the four years since Baker, no other appellate court in the United States has decided a case involving a claim for same-sex marriage. Moreover, the Vermont decision rests entirely on an unusual provision of the Vermont Constitution, the so-called Common Benefits Clause, that is found in only a few other state constitutions. What this speaker was trying to do was to make the Baker case go away. But it won\u27t The fact that a conference in Utah devoted an entire panel to Baker nearly four years after it was decided is a sure sign of its continuing importance. Baker was the first decision of a state supreme court requiring that the benefits and responsibilities of marriage be extended to gay male and lesbian couples. And Vermont’s legislature was the first legislature to affirm those benefits for its gay and lesbian citizens. The decision and the action of the legislature in adopting the civil union legislation produced temporary political upheaval in Vermont. In the rest of the country, the decision was praised by liberal activists and used by many to push for expanded recognition of same-sex relationships in their own states. At the same time, the decision was condemned by conservative Catholics, Christian fundamentalists, and right-wing politicians. Professor Mello’s book preserves this historic set of events in Vermont, drawing on newspaper accounts, on letters to the editor, on the sometimes angry, sometimes joyous testimony of private citizens before the Vermont legislature, and on interviews with some of the principal actors in the drama. I believe you will find this a gripping story

Child Support in the Twenty-First Century

Fifty years from now, or a hundred years from now, will absent parents still be held financially liable for the support of their children? Two forces have shaped our current system of private liability. The first is a perception, wholly accurate, of large numbers of children in need, children who cannot be adequately provided for by the single parent with whom they live. The second is a moral judgment about absent parents: that they can be justly required to contribute to their children\u27s support throughout the children\u27s minority. Change may occur in the laws of child support if there cease to be any substantial number of children in need-unlikely, but possible-or if there are changes in the perception of the degree of moral responsibility absent parents bear for their children\u27s support or in attitudes toward the proper role of government in assuring the needs of children. The issues of need and responsibility may seem separate but in fact intertwine. In our society, need is a relative, not an absolute, concept. A person who has less than she or he ought is in need. Children who have lived with both parents, both working, at a high standard of living but now live with one parent at a moderate standard may be perceived as in need even if they live today at as high a standard as the mean of American children. Whether we consider them in need turns in part on whether we consider them to have moral claims on the absent parent\u27s income. Thus, changes in either perceptions of need or perceptions of responsibility, if they occur at all, may well occur at about the same rate. What is difficult to foresee is the rate or direction of change

Kevin E. Kennedy

Our first encounter was on one of Kevin\u27s many triumphant days during law school. Kevin, then a second year student, had advanced to the final round of the Campbell Competition, the moot court competition in which students brief and argue a case as if before the United States Supreme Court. I was one of the five justices who heard the case. The others were the dean and three distinguished appellate judges. Four students presented oral arguments and all were fine, but, Kevin\u27s, the Justices agreed, was simply of a different order