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Mitchell Hamline Law Review 
Volume 50 Issue 3 Article 1 
2024 
Dedication to Professor Emerita Marie Failinger 
Edwin Butterfoss 
Follow this and additional works at: https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/mhlr 
 Part of the Legal Education Commons 
Recommended Citation 
Butterfoss, Edwin (2024) "Dedication to Professor Emerita Marie Failinger," Mitchell Hamline Law Review: 
Vol. 50: Iss. 3, Article 1. 
Available at: https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/mhlr/vol50/iss3/1 
This Dedication is brought to you for free and open 
access by the Law Reviews and Journals at Mitchell 
Hamline Open Access. It has been accepted for inclusion 
in Mitchell Hamline Law Review by an authorized 
administrator of Mitchell Hamline Open Access. For more 
information, please contact 
sean.felhofer@mitchellhamline.edu. 
© Mitchell Hamline School of Law 
 
 
DEDICATION TO PROFESSOR EMERITA MARIE 
FAILINGER 
 
Edwin Butterfoss 
 
I am extremely honored to have been asked to write a 
dedication of this issue of the Mitchell Hamline Law Review 
in honor of my dear friend and remarkable colleague, Marie 
Failinger.1 Marie and I started our teaching careers at 
Hamline University School of Law on the same day more than 
forty years ago. I always get nervous when I reveal that. I think 
of the old joke about the lawyer who passed away at the 
relatively young age of sixty. When he asked Saint Peter at the 
pearly gates why God had taken him at when he was just sixty, 
Saint Peter replied, “Sixty? According to your time sheets you 
are 85!”  All I can say is I’m thankful there are no time sheets 
in academia. Otherwise, I can imagine that when I tell people 
Marie and I started on the same day and retired within six 
months of each other, there would be a scratching of heads 
and comments like, “That’s strange. According to your time 
sheets, you were only at Hamline half as long as Marie.” 
Nobody works as hard as Marie Failinger. Faculty 
members always talk about the “three legs” of the job of a law 
professor: teaching, scholarship, and service. And whenever 
there is a discussion at faculty meetings about the 
expectations for faculty productivity, folks always seek the 
assurance that when evaluations take place, “strength in one 
area can balance less activity in another.” That is not the Marie 
Failinger model.  Marie was a dedicated, effective teacher; a 
remarkable, deep-thinking and productive scholar; and she 
engaged in prolific and important service, particularly with 
her efforts to increase opportunities for women in the legal 
profession.  And she did this all the while being a devoted 
single mother raising her daughters and grandchildren. 
Marie came to Hamline after spending the early years 
of her career as a legal services lawyer in southern Indiana, 
not a place that welcomed such lawyers with open arms back 
then.  In a small-world story, my boss, the Managing Director 
of the ABA Section of Legal Education, where I worked the last 
several years of my career, told me Marie was his first boss out 
of law school. He told me not only was Marie the best boss he 
ever worked for, but that he learned an enormous amount 
 
1 This dedication is adapted from remarks made by the author at the February 21, 
2023, event “Law, Religion, and a Beloved Teacher-Scholar: Celebrating Professor 
Marie Failinger on her Retirement.” 
2024]           PROTECTING INDIANA DUNES NATIONAL PARK  455 
 
455 
 
about being a lawyer and about courage from Marie. He said 
it was remarkable to watch Marie advocate for her clients, 
making creative legal arguments, never backing down, and 
almost lecturing (we’ll call it “educating”) the judges on their 
obligation to do their duty to address the injustices her clients 
were facing. And doing so in a way that did not draw the ire, 
but instead the respect, of the judges. 
I’m not surprised that Marie earned the respect of 
judges she appeared before. I watched Marie quickly earn the 
enormous respect of her colleagues at Hamline. One 
indication of that is her being selected to serve as associate 
dean, probably the most difficult job at a law school, as a 
relatively junior faculty member extremely early in her career. 
Given the issues that an associate dean must deal with, and 
the sometimes-sensitive discussions an associate dean must 
have with colleagues, that is a remarkable statement about 
how her colleagues felt about Marie very early in her career. 
Part of Marie gaining the respect of her colleagues was, 
as I’ve mentioned, how hard she worked.  But it was more than 
that. It wasn’t just the long hours she put in, but the ideas she 
had and the projects she worked on. Daniel Burnham, the 
famed Chicago architect and moving force behind the 1893 
Chicago World Fair, reportedly told city leaders thinking 
about hosting a World’s Fair, “Make no little plans.” That 
could have been Marie’s mantra. I confess that on many 
occasions, Marie would propose an idea or a project the school 
should undertake, and I would think, “Well, that’s not 
realistic—we’re not Yale or Harvard; we don’t have those 
kinds of resources.” But that never stopped Marie. She knew 
that extra hard work could help overcome a lack of resources, 
and she also understood that even if we were only able to 
accomplish half of the big project, or a quarter of it, it would 
be worth the effort and would improve the school and the lives 
of our students. Marie never made little plans! And her efforts 
always improved the school and the lives of her students. 
Marie also gained the respect of her colleagues because 
she unfailingly urged us to “do the right thing.” No one had a 
stronger moral compass, or followed it so unfailingly, than 
Marie.  Those who have attended law school might recall the 
classic tort concept of a defendant who had “a clean heart, but 
an empty mind.” That is not Marie. Marie has a sparkling 
clean heart, but a remarkably intellectual mind. That mind 
produced prodigious amounts of scholarship. And the 
scholarship typically was not the run-of-the-mill review of 
456 MITCHELL HAMLINE LAW REVIEW [Vol. 50:3 
 
456 
 
court decisions or legal doctrine. Marie’s scholarship was 
original, intellectually robust, and often dealt with, and 
offered a unique take on, significant moral and ethical issues 
facing the legal profession and the world. 
When I contemplate Marie’s career, the John Wesley 
quote that concluded every graduation Marie and I attended 
at Hamline comes to mind: “Do all the good you can, by all the 
means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you 
can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, for as 
long as ever you can.” Many of us were inspired by that quote, 
but Marie lived that quote more fully than anyone I know. 
There are not enough honors and accolades available 
to do justice to the legal career of Marie Failinger, but I am 
extremely pleased that the Board of the Mitchell Hamline 
Law Review is dedicating this issue to Marie. This gesture no 
doubt will mean a lot to Marie. It is particularly appropriate 
given her dedication to legal scholarship both as the author of 
dozens (and dozens) of law review articles, numerous 
contributions to books, and many, many essays in a wide 
variety of publications, as well as her years of service as an 
author, Board member, and Editor-in-Chief of the highly 
regarded Journal of Law and Religion. Congratulations, 
Marie, on your career, on the enormous impact you have had 
on the lives and careers of hundreds of students, and on the 
honor of having this issue dedicated to you. I consider myself 
extremely lucky to have had the privilege of calling you a 
friend and colleague for the past forty years. 


Dedication to Professor Emerita Marie Failinger

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