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He teaches Civil Procedure and Professional Responsibility,
as well as a special course with original materials on Litigation with the
Federal Government. His casebook, "Litigation
With the Federal Government: Cases and Materials," was
originally published by Foundation
Press in 2000 and is now in its second edition (2008). It has been adopted at several law schools,
including Georgetown University, George Washington University, Catholic
University, New York University, the University of Pittsburgh,
and McGeorge School of Law.
Professor Sisk also is author of the treatise on the subject, "Litigation
With the Federal Government," published as the fourth edition by
ALI-ABA in 2006, and recently cited by the United States Supreme Court. He has
written nearly four dozen
articles, many published in top 25 law reviews, on litigation with the federal government, judicial decision-making,
awards of attorney's fees, professional responsibility, constitutional
interpretation, law and religion, and tort reform. His articles have
been cited by the United States Supreme Court, several federal courts of
appeals, and the supreme courts of several states. In a keynote speech
before the annual Judicial Conference of the Court of Federal Claims in
2008, Judge S. Jay Plager of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal
Circuit singled out one of Sisk’s articles as the “definitive piece” on
Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction over money claims and saying “it is
always refreshing to find a law review article that addresses issues
that are relevant to the work of judges and practicing lawyers.”
S. Jay Plager, Money and Power: Observations on the Jurisdiction of the
U.S. Court of Federal Claims, 17 Fed. Cir. B.J. 371, 374 (2008).
Sisk's empirical
study of judicial decisionmaking and the influence of judicial background,
co-authored with Professors Michael Heise and Andrew Morriss, was published
in the New York University Law Review and received the
1999 Article Prize from the Law and Society Association.
Professor Sisk has remained active as a member of the legal
profession. He maintains a
limited practice, primarily as an appellate attorney and as an
expert witness on professional ethics and conduct. In recent years, he has
focused that limited practice on claims against the federal government
in the Supreme Court and other courts. See
John R. Sand & Gravel Co.
v. United States,
128 S. Ct. 750 (2008) (co-counsel for petitioner on case asking whether
the statute of limitations for claims in the Court of Federal Claims is
a jurisdictional condition on the waiver of sovereign immunity); United
States v. Tohono O’odham Nation, No. 09-846 (decided April 26, 2011)
(author of amicus curiae brief in support of neither party arguing that
the Court of Federal Claims has exclusive authority in cases where the
substance of the dispute is a claim for money and suggesting that the
better answer to the problem of duplicative lawsuits in multiple courts
is to transfer the district court case to the Court of Federal Claims to
be resolved in a single case). On
Sisk's appellate litigation, see also Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe
Railway Co. v. Brown & Bryant, Inc.,
132 F.3d 1295, 1303 n.5 (9th Cir. 1997), amended, 159 F.3d 358,
365 n.6 (9th Cir. 1998) ("Litigation
often produces criticism for its participants. This case, however,
was extraordinarily well briefed and argued by consummate professionals
on both sides and we are grateful for that.").
Building on an earlier
ranking of the "Scholarly Impact" of the Top 25 law faculties by
Professor Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago, Professor Sisk led
a study in 2010 to explore the scholarly
impact of the faculties at all law
schools accredited by the American Bar Association and then ranked the
top seventy law faculties. Refined by Professor Leiter, the
“Scholarly Impact Score” for a law
faculty is calculated from the mean and the median of total law journal
citations over the past five years to the work of tenured members of
that law faculty. As previously ranked by Professor Leiter, the
law faculties at Yale, Harvard, Chicago,and Stanford stand out
nationally in scholarly prominence,
followed by several others that are traditionally ranked among the elite
law schools. Extending the ranking to the Top 70, Sisk found that
several law schools accredited within the past twelve years -- the
University of St. Thomas, Nevada-Las Vegas, Chapman, and Florida
International -- have already made a scholarly
impact that dramatically outpaces their
academic reputations. The full study is reported
here
and the National Jurist news article about the Leiter and Sisk
studies may be found
here. Professor
Sisk previously served as reporter for the Iowa Rules of Professional
Conduct Drafting Committee appointed by the Iowa Supreme Court to draft
the new set of ethics rules to govern lawyers in Iowa. He is the
co-author of the continuing treatise on lawyer ethics in Iowa. "Lawyer
and Judicial Ethics: Iowa Practice" (Thomson-West, 2010) (with
Chief Justice Mark S. Cady of the Iowa Supreme Court). He is a
member of the American Law Institute, the nation's premier law reform
organization. Sisk is also active with
the Conference on Catholic Legal Thought, writing and speaking about
religion and public life and the role of faith in professional life.
He occasionally participates as a member of the
Mirror of Justice blog,
which present a diverse array of Catholic perspectives on the law,
public life, and social justice. Sisk lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota
with his wife, Mindy, and his daughter, Caitlin. |
