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Friday, December 09, 2005 

Belling Sides with Marquette

That's right. Hell has frozen over. Mark Belling is on his radio show right now, agreeing with the suspension of the dental student. He is pushing the idea that this student couldn't make this statement outside of the internet (like in print), so he shouldn't be able to make it on the internet.

And your surprised that Belliing is taking that stance why?

-A

Another thing to consider is that here at Madtown, you can be suspended for off-campus conduct such as underage drinking (how they figure out that you were ticketed, though, is beyond me). I agree that Marquette is being insanely ridiculous in this censorship case, but clearly even public universities allow themselves to enforce off-campus code of conducts.

I'm surprised because Belling usually loves to rip Marquette. He himself said that he was surprised to find himself siding with the administration.

The reach of these off campus conduct suspensions is very questionable to me. I do agree that the universities have every right to enforce their ethics codes. But given the incredibly vague wording of the ethics code provisions, how is a student supposed to comply with them? What exactly will get me into ethics trouble?

We discussed this in Law Governing Lawyers/Professional Responsibility/Ethics/whatever you want to call it. The WI state bar demands "good moral character" from its lawyers. What IS that? The Misconduct Rule (our equivalent of MRPC 8.4) says that misconduct includes violations of the attorney's oath. The attorney's oath demands that we "avoid an offensive personality." What does THAT mean? No one knows.

That is the problem here. We have no real guidelines as students to help us conform with the regulations. Basically, the university is saying that we are in violation whenever they say we are. Having a standard that broad is like making up the rules ex post facto.

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