E.J. Hunt '80

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

From his early years, E.J. Hunt understood the value of liberty. His parents had emigrated from Ireland where his father had been imprisoned by authorities without trial on suspicion of ties with the Irish Republican Army. His father's experience provided E.J. with a very personal object lesson about the need to protect the rights of individuals - particularly the powerless - against the vast resources and power of the state. This was a lesson that would ultimately shape his personal vision and his professional life.

E.J. Hunt grew up on the South side of Chicago in a poor area called "the back of the yards". As a young man he attended St. Ignatius High - a well-known Jesuit secondary school. Hunt says his Jesuit education with its traditional emphasis on academic excellence and the service of others was an enormously important and positive influence on him. Thirty years after his high school graduation, a grateful Hunt would endow a scholarship for poor and disadvantaged students at his alma mater. He wanted to do his part to ensure that there would be others who would benefit from the same exceptional opportunity he had decades earlier at St. Ignatius. After high school, Hunt continued his education with the Jesuits at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Hunt enjoyed his college experience and his continued association with the Jesuits. Outside the classroom, he played rugby for the school and reveled in the excitement of the glory years of Marquette basketball under the fered endary coach, Al McGuire. After graduating in 1976, Hunt spent a year in Chicago working for a title company and saving his money for graduate school. The following year he began his legal studies. To no one's surprise he did so at another Jesuit institution - Gonzaga.

E.J. Hunt talks in superlatives when describing his time at the Law School. He speaks of the personal attention provided by the faculty, the great camaraderie and life-long friendships he formed with classmates such as Jim Walsh, Jim Kovac and Pam Resnick; and the extraordinary experience he had in the clinic under the tutelage of Professors Wilson, Hartje, McNeil and Critchlow. He also managed time to play rugby with University's club team which elected him "Captain of the Scrum." Rugby, he found, was the perfect antidote to the stress of legal studies.

After graduation, Hunt returned to Milwaukee and joined a business litigation firm. While the trial experience was valuable, he longed to get into the type of public service law he experienced at the clinic. He made an inquiry and was hired by a public defender program run by a former clinical law professor who was very familiar with the quality of Gonzaga's clinical program. Hunt spent five years in the office before moving on to teach and supervise in the clinical law program of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. While at Wisconsin he had many opportunities to meet with clinical professors from around the country and to hear in what high regard they held Gonzaga's program.

In 1991 Hunt opened his own private practice in Milwaukee. Today the Hunt Law Group is an "AV" rated firm that specializes in criminal defense trial work and post conviction appeals in both state and Federal Courts. In addition to the firm's main office in Milwaukee, there are satellite offices in Madison and Superior, Wisconsin.

His practice has both privately-retained clients and those who cannot afford to pay for their representation. Hunt has developed a deserved reputation for handling difficult and complex criminal cases. He participated in the longest criminal trial ever held in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. His client was the only one of 17 defendants to receive a jury acquittal on a substantive RICO charge which would have resulted in a sentence of life in prison without parole. On the appellate side, his work has yielded a number of reported cases - including a 7th Circuit opinion which broke new ground by excluding a confidential informant's out-of-court statement identifying the defendant as the perpetrator.

Hunt is a past president of the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; a Lifetime member of the National Associations of Criminal Defense Lawyers; and a member of the Emeritus Panel of the Federal Defenders of the Eastern District of Wisconsin.

He is a frequent presenter at state and national CLE programs on criminal law. He was also selected as the expert legal commentator by Milwaukee's ABC affiliate for their two-week coverage of the highly publicized trial of former Green Bay Packer football star, Mark Chmura.

For many, the emotional trauma of criminal practice takes a significant toll. Hunt acknowledges that he has seen many tragic stories but he is not on the edge of "burnout". He considers his work a real privilege - an opportunity to preserve the liberties we are guaranteed under the constitution and to continue an important tradition of commitment and service - particularly to the poor and disenfranchised. Paraphrasing Clarence Darrow, he says "I have represented both the rich and the poor, but I have never represented the rich against the poor - the powerful against the powerless".

This ideal of service to the most vulnerable is what really animates E.J. Hunt. Criminal practice can be emotionally and physically draining, but as philosopher and psychiatrist Viktor Frankel has said "Man can take any what, any who and any where as long as there is a why.

"E.J. Hunt has found his why" and so he can truthfully say, "I could not think of a better profession to be in or a better type of law to practice."