What is your favorite summer activity? Any vacation plans?
Summer is my favorite season. I like to get outside as often as possible, and I really enjoy picnicking and birdwatching with my family. Devil’s Lake State Park is one of our favorite picnic locations. Birdwatching is a relatively new hobby for me, thanks to my husband. Our two young daughters participate, too. My youngest (she’s almost two) points out birds whenever she sees them, although she calls most birds “orioles”!
We plan to spend most of our vacation time this summer travelling to visit family or hosting friends and family at our home. It is always fun to show guests around Wisconsin, and there will probably be a lot of picnicking and birdwatching involved.
What is one thing you do to improve your writing?
Good writing begins with readinggood writing. And often that requires reading outside of the law.
After I finished law school, Dean Kearney of Marquette University Law School gave me a copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web as an example of clear and lively prose. White was a master of his craft. I also have enjoyed reading a collection of the essays that he published in The New Yorker. Other places that I’ve found good writing include The Atlantic, essays and books authored by David Foster Wallace and Gregg Easterbrook (Judge Easterbrook’s brother, who appears to think as much and as incisively about football as his brother thinks about jurisdiction), and columns written by Alan Abelson, the former editor of Barron’s – to name just a few.
What are you currently reading?
I just finished a book by Seth Rosenfeld called Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. It is a fascinating and well-researched book centering on the free speech movement at the University of California-Berkeley. The author filed five Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to help obtain the materials for the book, and it took about 30 years to write.
I also recently read No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, by Glenn Greenwald. Both books illustrate how civil rights can be impacted by government surveillance, but they involve technological capabilities that are much, much different. Our firm conducts a fair amount of FOI litigation, so both books were interesting from that perspective as well.
What unconventional lessons have you learned in law practice thus far?
The Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Department of Justice tax division, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Wisconsin Department of Justice, Wisconsin Department of Revenue, and Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development are populated with talented and helpful lawyers and other personnel who are often less interested in “winning” and more interested in doing justice under the law. Sometimes the best resolution is found by framing the issue as an exercise in problem solving given the facts, the law, alternative ways of viewing the question, and the – sometimes considerable – discretion available to the particular government actor.
Another lesson is a dark sense of humor is helpful in coping with the messiness of life and the law. One aspect of this is the recognition that often not a whole lot sets apart tragedy from comedy. This recognition can lead to a greater understanding of and empathy toward those around us.
