Kevin Conway

  • Courts or Community Conversations?

    Hon. Michael Y. Scudder is a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. This is a lightly edited version of the E. Harold Hallows Lecture, delivered at Marquette University Law School on March 3, 2025, and titled “Article III Standing as the Guardian of Free Speech and Democratic Self-Governance.” The lecture…

  • Connectivity (We Don’t Mean Wi-Fi)

    This article is a complementary piece to “Courts or Community Conversations?“ Judge Michael Scudder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and Professor Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, are both observers of the dynamics of American civic life. Put them together for a dialogue conducted both in person…

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    What If…

    Illustrations by Robert Neubecker Taylor Thompson was concerned how things would go in her first year as a first-grade teacher in a public elementary school in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And, in fact, she found teaching during that 2024–2025 school year to be hard work. “Each day is not rainbows and singing and dancing,” she said. But…

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    Principals Can Play Big Roles in Teacher Success

    This is a sidebar to a longer essay, “What if . . . K–12 Education Reform Efforts Focused on Making Teaching Jobs More Doable?“ Illustrations by Robert Neubecker While pay and benefits matter, the research is clear that many teachers who quit their jobs cite low job satisfaction. And many of them attribute this in…

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    Louisiana’s ‘Let Teachers Teach’ Plan Strikes a Chord

    Illustrations by Robert Neubecker This is a sidebar to a longer essay, “What if . . . K–12 Education Reform Efforts Focused on Making Teaching Jobs More Doable?“ Louisiana as a leader in education improvement? The idea would have drawn guffaws for many years. The state had some of the weakest K–12 education records in…

  • Collecting Posts on Seventh Circuit Day

    It was a great privilege for Marquette University Law School to host the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Eckstein Hall earlier this semester (September 25, 2025). The following blog posts form a now-complete series seeking to capture some aspects of the day: Sincere thanks to all—the Court and its staff, those…

  • New Marquette Law School national survey finds 55% say Department of Justice has filed unjustified cases against Trump’s political opponents

    Also: Please note: Complete Poll results and methodology information can be found online at law.marquette.edu/poll MILWAUKEE – A new Marquette Law School Poll national survey finds 55% say the Department of Justice has filed unjustified criminal cases against President Donald Trump’s political opponents, while 45% think the cases are justified. Recent cases have been brought…

  • New Marquette Law School national survey finds more people favoring Democrats than Republicans in anticipated 2026 vote for Congress and also more Democrats saying they are certain to vote

    Please note: Complete Poll results and methodology information can be found online at law.marquette.edu/poll MILWAUKEE —A new Marquette Law School Poll national survey, conducted following the Nov. 5 elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and elsewhere, finds that 49% of registered voters expect to vote for a Democrat and 44% expect to vote for a Republican in…

  • No Walking Away

    How Paying Attention to Correctional Officers Will Help Us Understand the Harms American Incarceration Causes.

  • The Washington Post wins 2025 Dori J. Maynard Justice Award

    Washington Post reporters Dana Hedgpeth, Sari Horwitz, and The Washington Post staff have won the 2025 Dori J. Maynard Justice Award for “Indian Boarding Schools,” a searing five-part series based on an 18-month investigation of the widespread sexual abuse of Native American children by Catholic priests, brothers and sisters. Judges called the entry “haunting,” “beautifully…