Student: Sean Battle
Mentor: Karen Dunaway Hare
Case: Durkee v. Murphy
Lawyer: Robert P. McGuinn
I was impressed with the effort that Sean put into his biography of Robert P. McGuinn, especially in taking the time to track down his daughter Roberta and to arrange a personal interview with her at her home. He also took a lot of time to physically visit the four Baltimore golf courses as well as the sites of Robert McGuinn's former law offices in Baltimore. The genealogy he attached of the McGuinn family was also very extensive and well-done, I thought. (I also found it interesting that McGuinn interviewed student applicants to the program administered by the Southern Regional Education Board, which we had researched for the McCready case!) Sean did a thorough job in his paper on the Durkee v. Murphy case of recounting the facts of that case and the related suit brought by Charles Law.
Sean's two weaknesses are in style and analysis. There are numerous grammatical errors and the papers are choppy and some sentences are unclear. In some sentences it was not clear whether he was recounting the lawyers' arguments or making his own, and the reader has to make inferences from the context. Sean was good at tracing the facts of the cases but there was very little if any of his own analysis. The paper would be strengthened by a discussion of the cases within the wider context of the social and legal aspects of the civil rights movement in Maryland and the United States. Sean needs to draw a clear conclusion as to the impact these cases had on the civil rights movement and to answer the question of whether the cases had any long-term legal significance (ie. cited in later cases).
Karen |
