Is the Wisconsin State Bar’s conflict of interest self-imposed?

The Irreverent Lawyer just wrote about the current bill in Arizona that would turn their bloated and pricey state bar from a mandatory organization into a voluntary one.  One of the problems with these mandatory bars, he explains, is that they have an inherent conflict of interest.  And by separating the lawyer regulation function from the trade association function (in which membership would become voluntary) the conflict of interest disappears.  That is, a voluntary bar, separated from the lawyer regulation function, would no longer be torn between serving the general public and working on behalf of its membership.  But in Wisconsin, the lawyer regulation function (OLR) is already separate from the mandatory bar (although the bar seems to keep its fingers, to some extent, in the lawyer regulation pie).  So given its separation from the OLR, why does the Wisconsin State Bar consistently work with the OLR and against its own membership?  The bar does claim to also work for its dues-paying membership, so it does operate under an obvious conflict of interest.  Yet, given its supposed independence from the OLR, it seems that the Wisconsin State Bar’s conflict of interest is self-imposed.

State Bar of Wisconsin seeks donations to honor executive director’s “service”

I recently got an email from the Wisconsin Law Foundation (an arm of the state bar) signed by the bar’s president.  The bar is seeking donations so it can host three separate send-offs to honor its retiring executive director (E.D.).  Donations correspond to increasingly hierarchical titles.  For example, a $250 donation buys me the title of American Counselor, whereas $1,000 buys me the far more prestigious title of English Barrister.  (The titles of “landed gentry” and “aristocrat” are apparently not available.)  Donors’ names, along with their newly acquired titles, will appear on the party invites for all to see.  From what I can tell, the donations fund the three retirement parties and these parties, in turn, “will focus on raising support for the good work of the Law Foundation.”  So I’m not sure if the bar will hit up the party-goers for additional donations or if there will be some sort of raffle — the email isn’t entirely clear.  Equally unclear is how much we lawyers have been paying the E.D. for his years of “service” that the bar is so eager to celebrate.    

Bill would protect free speech on UW campuses

I used to think that the only constitutional rights in danger were those associated with criminal law.  A classic example is the Fourth Amendment.  When a defendant moves to suppress physical evidence (typically a small amount of marijuana) in a criminal case that was set in motion by an illegal search, courts will bend over backwards to find that no Fourth Amendment violation occurred.  And even when they are forced to concede that the defendant’s rights were, in fact, violated, they insanely conclude that the defendant is not entitled to suppression of the illegally obtained evidence.  (For more on this mind-boggling state of affairs, see this article.)

"Fourth-Tier" Legal Education

A common trend among law schools was to hire professors who had very little or no experience practicing law, but who had graduated from elite law schools.  Then the trend became hiring JDs who also had a PhD — preferably in the field of economics.  Then the trend became hiring candidates with PhDs only.  That’s right: law professors who never went to law school.  And unfortunately, the lower ranked schools, in a desperate attempt to keep up their peer-reputation scores in the US News law school rankings, followed suit and copied the trend.  In a 2012 essay titled Three Rules for Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, I argued that these fourth-tier schools should instead go in the opposite direction of the elites:

State Bar of Wisconsin to the rescue!

Donald Trump recently criticized a federal judge by calling him a “so-called judge” and arguing that the judge’s suspension of Trump’s executive order put the country at risk.  So of course, the Wisconsin State Bar’s “52-member Board of Governors” had to swing into action and adopt “a unified statement” to protect the federal judiciary from the impact of free speech.  Personally, I have no opinion as to whether Trump’s criticism is accurate, but I have serious problems with our state bar — an organization that we Wisconsin lawyers are forced to join and fund — making this so-called unified statement.

"Roger that"

I don't care much (or at all) for the NFL, and I didn't have much of an opinion on Tom Brady until the super bowl when he threw that pick-six.  The impressive thing was that, after he threw it, he dove to try to stop the much more athletic defensive player from scoring.  As a viewer, I genuinely appreciated the effort.  And even though Brady didn't come close to stopping the touchdown -- he looked well out of his depth trying tackle a superior athlete -- he did go on to win the super bowl MVP (again) by leading the biggest comeback in the game's history.

Despite not being a fan of Brady's until (oddly) that pick-six, I had been routing for him in his fight against Roger Goodell in the deflate-gate fiasco.  And there was good reason to do so, as there was certainly a lot of evidence on Brady's side.  Granted, a Brady win in court would not have been like an indigent defendant winning a criminal jury trial.  Rather, a Brady win in court would have been more like "the man" sticking it to "THE MAN."  But still . . .

Anyway, Brady did beat Roger but only temporarily -- or so it seemed.  It turns out that Brady got the last laugh in the end.  Despite serving a four-game suspension earlier this year, he won the super bowl.  He won the MVP in the super bowl.  Roger was forced to praise him in public and present him with his trophies.  And then Brady got to run this post-game commercial. 

         

An open letter to our next state bar president

I recently received a mailing from Jon P. Axelrod who is running for state bar president.  He provides a bullet-point list of some things he wants to accomplish.  I have an opinion on three of those things.  First, Axelrod wants to “provid[e] money to forgive student loans” to encourage law school graduates to practice in “underserved areas of Wisconsin.”  I’m not sure where this money would come from, but this debt-forgiveness frolic had better not be funded by our bar dues.  As the Irreverent Lawyer has shown us, Wisconsin’s state bar bureaucracy is already one of the most expensive in the country.  Also, there’s simply no need to encourage new lawyers to take jobs.  There is a glut of lawyers in Wisconsin already, and they’re scrambling to find work. Only 64 percent of UW grads and 62 percent of MU grads from the class of 2015 found long-term, full-time legal jobs.  

The Battle over the Burden of Proof: A Report from the Trenches, 79 U. Pitt. L. Rev. __ (2017)

I've recently coauthored two articles with Psychology Professor Lawrence White on Wisconsin's burden of proof jury instruction. The articles (available here) are based on our two controlled studies that empirically prove what was already obvious from a linguistic and logical perspective. That is, when a burden of proof instruction concludes by telling jurors "not to search for doubt" but instead "to search for the truth," the court is lowering the burden of proof below the constitutionally guaranteed reasonable-doubt standard. In both studies, mock jurors who were so instructed convicted the defendant at significantly higher rates than jurors who were simply and properly instructed on reasonable doubt.

Advance Praise for "Convicting Avery"

My forthcoming book, “Convicting Avery: The Bizarre Laws and Broken System behind Making a Murderer,” recently received two great reviews. 

Publishers Weekly writes: “Cicchini convincingly demonstrates that the Kafkaesque criminal justice in Avery’s case was not an anomaly, and his work is an accessible entree into the debate over how defendants’ rights should be protected.”

Kirkus Reviews writes:  “Overall, Cicchini makes his case clearly. . . . [Convicting Avery] will engage fans of the series and readers who wonder if prosecutors really do cut corners in their campaigns against serious criminals.”

The book will be released on April 4th, and can be pre-ordered on amazon.com.

Weird Science in Wisconsin Courts

Click here to read my latest column at the Wisconsin Law Journal, which is an excerpt from the chapter titled "Weird Science" in my forthcoming book Convicting Avery.  (The book will be published by Prometheus Books on April 4th, and is available for pre-order here.)