Tech Tip | State Bar of Wisconsin Members Receive Complimentary Case Law Research

Would you like to trim research costs or reduce the number of jurisdictions covered under your existing legal research plan?

Consider Fastcase.

The State Bar of Wisconsin and Fastcase have partnered to provide State Bar members with case law research for state and federal jurisdictions.

Fastcase is a member benefit.

Visit wisbar.org and click on the Legal Research tab at the top of the page. Enter your member login when prompted. Then, click the Fastcase tab.

Under the Fastcase Advanced Search banner is a link and button that takes you to the Fastcase search page. From there, you can pick the jurisdictions to search, including Wisconsin.

If you need a refresher, read “Fastcase and Casemaker Merger: What It Means for State Bar Members,” InsideTrack, Feb. 3, 2021.

Quotable | “We are not experts in what white, wealthy and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791.”

– U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves

The historical analysis mandated by a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision has frustrated a federal district court judge.

Judge Carlton Reeves, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi, is presiding over a challenge to a federal law that bars felons from possessing firearms.

Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision, restrictions on gun ownership are valid only if “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Judge Reeve wrote that Bruen forces him to “play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” In November 2022, he ordered the parties to brief whether he should appoint a historian.

“This court is not a trained historian,” Reeves wrote in the order. “The justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians.”

Source: CNN

Good Idea? | End of the Line for LSAT?

The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) is living on borrowed time.

In November 2022, an American Bar Association (ABA) council voted to end the requirement that law schools use the LSAT or any other standardized test when making admission decisions, beginning in autumn 2025.

The vote came despite objections from 60 law school deans, including Daniel P. Tokaji, dean of the U.W. Law School.

In a letter to the ABA’s Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions, the deans said removing the LSAT requirement would force schools to rely more heavily on grade point averages when making admissions decisions. Such a reliance, the deans wrote, would “diminish the diversity of law schools’ incoming classes.”

Source: Reuters

» Cite this article: 96 Wis. Law. 8 (January 2023).