Maybe the Brewers Should Hire a Lawyer as Their Next Manager

The announcement that St. Louis Cardinal manager Tony LaRussa is retiring after his team’s victory in the 2011 World Series provides us with an opportunity to remind the non-lawyer world of the extraordinary success of lawyers who have served as managers in Major League baseball.

LaRussa, who earned his law degree from Florida State in 1978, is one of only seven law school graduates and/or lawyers to manage in the major leagues.  The other six were John Montgomery Ward, Hughie Jennings, Branch Rickey, Miller Huggins, Muddy Ruel, and Jack Hendricks.  In addition, all seven played in the major leagues as players, though with varying degrees of success.

As a group, the seven were quite successful.  LaRussa, who managed in the majors from 1979 to 2011, managed the second largest number of games in baseball history (second to Connie Mack who owned the team that he managed) and recorded the third greatest number of victories (behind Mack and non-lawyer John McGraw).  Altogether, LaRussa’s teams won 14 division championships, six league titles (three in the National League and three in the American), and three World Series titles.

Miller Huggins, who managed the Cardinals and the Yankees from 1913 to 1929 (the year that he died), was almost as successful as LaRussa, winning six American League championships and three World Series.  (Having Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig on his Yankee teams may have had something to do with his success.) Huggins was a graduate of the University of Cincinnati Law School where one of his professors was future United States President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William Howard Taft.

In contrast to LaRussa and Huggins, Branch Rickey managed in the major leagues from 1913-1915, and 1919-1925, with no particular success—his best teams finished 3rd in 1921 and 1922.  However, as a club president and team general manager he was perhaps the most successful and most influential front office executive in baseball history.  As the inventor of the farm system and the first baseball general manager to sign African-American players, his teams in St. Louis and Brooklyn won eight league championships and four World Series titles.  Rickey was a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, and as a law student, he supported himself by coaching the Michigan varsity baseball team.

Hughie Jennings, manager of the Detroit Tigers from 1907 to 1920, and of the New York Giants in 1924 and 1925, attended Cornell Law School, and while he left without graduating, he was subsequently admitted to the Maryland bar.  Although Jennings was never able to lead the Tigers or the Giants to a championship, as a player he was the star shortstop on five National League championship teams in the 1890’s, and, notwithstanding his lack of titles, he was the winningest manager in Detroit Tiger history until he was passed by Sparky Anderson late in the 20th century.

John Montgomery Ward, who earned a law degree from Columbia while playing with the New York Giants in the 1880’s, was one of the premiere shortstops (and at the beginning of his career, pitchers) in nineteenth century baseball.  He also managed a number of the teams that he played, serving as player-manager in 1880, 1884, and 1890-1894.  Although Ward won championships as a player, none of the teams he managed ever finished at the top of the heap. However, his teams were usually quite respectable, and he did finish second four times in the seven years that he managed.

The only lawyer-managers that did not achieve great success as managers were Jack Hendricks and Herald “Muddy”  Ruel.  Hendricks, who received his law degree from Northwestern, managed the St. Louis Cardinals in 1918 (between stints by fellow lawyers Huggins and Rickey) and the Cincinnati Reds from 1924 to 1929.  His best season came in 1926, when his Reds finished in 2nd place, behind the St. Louis Cardinals.

Muddy Ruel’s career as a major league catcher extended over a 19-year period during which he was widely regarded as one of the top defensive catchers in the game.  However, his service as a manager was relatively brief, lasting only for one year, 1947, when he managed the St. Louis Browns to a last place finish.  Although 1947, was his only year as a manager, he spent many years in the major as a coach, and he ended his career in baseball as the general manager of the Detroit Tigers in the mid-1950’s.

The success of the lawyer-managers has not gone unnoticed.  Four of the seven lawyer-managers (Huggins, Rickey, Jennings, and Ward) are already in the baseball Hall-of-Fame, and Tony LaRussa will clearly join them once he becomes eligible for induction.  (Technically, only Huggins was elected to the Hall as a manager; Rickey was chosen as an executive; and Ward and Jennings went in as players.)  Jack Hendricks’s .496 winning percentage as a manager and .207 batting average in his two major league seasons translate into a 0.0% change of ever being elected to the Hall of Fame.  Although Ruel was recognized as an outstanding defensive player who specialized in throwing out baserunners trying to steal, he seems unlikely to ever be elected to the Hall of Fame.  While his career .275 batting average was quite respectable for a catcher who played from 1915 to 1934, his four home runs in 19 years hardly shout out “Hall of Fame,” even though he did finish in the top 11 in American League Most  Valuable Player voting on three occasions

Given their lengthy careers in baseball, most of the lawyer-managers spent little time actually practicing law.  There is little evidence that Rickey, Huggins, Jennings or LaRussa spent any significant amounts of time in the courtroom or the law office.  However, after his playing days Ward went on to a long, successful career as a New York City lawyer, often representing figures in the sports industry.  Hendricks apparently did the same, and also appears to have worked as a lawyer in the off-season during his playing career which was mostly spent in the minor leagues.

Although Ruel was the least successful manager of the lawyer-managers, the Washington University Law School graduate may well have been the best lawyer of the group.   His legal acumen led Baseball Commissioner and former United States Senator Happy Chandler to appoint him as his chief assistant in 1946, and Ruel  was apparently the only one of the seven lawyer-managers ever admitted to practice before the United States Supreme Court.

On a final note, it is interesting that five of the seven lawyer-managers managed in St. Louis, directing either the Cardinals (Huggins, Hendricks, LaRussa), or the Browns (Ruel), or both (Rickey).  Apparently St. Louis is a good town for both baseball and lawyers.

Continue ReadingMaybe the Brewers Should Hire a Lawyer as Their Next Manager

The Marquette Law Professor Who Was President of the American Bar Association

Carl Barnett Rix was never a full-time professor at the Marquette Law School, but he was a part-time instructor for almost 40 years (1908-1946).  During that time he taught hundreds of Marquette law students while carrying on an active law practice and a professional life that led him to the presidencies of the Milwaukee Bar Association, the Wisconsin State Bar, and the American Bar Association.

A Wisconsin native, Rix was born in September 30, 1878.  His father was from Quebec, Canada, while his mother hailed from Milwaukee.  After finishing his public school education, he became a school teacher, and from 1895 to 1899, he taught in the public schools in Cedar Creek and West Bend, Wisconsin.  However, in the fall of 1899, he relocated to Washington, D.C., where he enrolled in Georgetown University to study law.  He received an LL.B. degree from Georgetown in 1903 and an LL.M. degree the following year.  He then went to work for the United States Bureau of the Census, but in 1905, he returned to Wisconsin where he passed the bar examination.  He then set up practice in Milwaukee as a member of a law firm eventually known as Rix, Kuelthau, and Kuelthau.  (He would remain affiliated with that firm for the next 58 years.)

Much of Rix’ career was devoted to bar association activities.

He served as president of the Milwaukee Bar Association in 1932 and 1933, and in the latter year, he was elected president of the Wisconsin State Bar (a position later held by current Marquette emeritus law professor James Ghiardi).

In 1946, he was elected president of the American Bar Association.  In addition to his service as ABA president, Rix was also a member of the ABA House of Delegates (1941-1945), the ABA Board of Governors (1938-1941), the ABA Committee on Peace and Law through the United Nations, and as Director of the ABA Endowment Fund (1941-1945).

After his stint as ABA president, Rix became increasingly concerned that the United Nations might intrude upon United States sovereignty, and in 1952, he testified before a United States Senate committee on behalf of the Bricker Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment designed to protect what its supporters viewed as traditional American freedoms from being compromised by what Rix called “treaty laws.”   As a result of similar concerns, Rix had also, on behalf of the ABA, opposed the United Nations Convention on Genocide in the late 1940’s.  After stepping down as ABA president, he remained active for many years with the ABA, devoting particular attention to the organization’s Library Services Committee.

A Republican in politics, Rix served as the campaign adviser to Gov. Thomas Dewey of New York during his successful run in the 1940 Wisconsin primary.  Although Dewey was defeated for the Republican nomination that year by Wendell Willkie, he was the G.O.P. standard-bearer in the 1944 and 1948 presidential elections.

Rix was a member of the original Marquette Law School faculty, and he began teaching at the school when it first opened in the fall of 1908.  He was, among the original faculty, the only professor who had been educated at a Jesuit (or Roman Catholic) law school, and he was among the Roman Catholic minority on the early faculty.

Although Rix taught a variety of courses over the years, his primary teaching responsibilities were in the fields of Real Property and Future Interests.  During his stint on the faculty he served under five deans—James Jenkins (1908-1916), Max Schoetz (1916-1927); Clifton Williams (1927-1933); Acting Dean Rev. Hugh MacMahon (1933); and Francis Swietlik (1934-1946).  In 1946, he stepped down from the faculty at age 67, upon his election as president of the ABA.  At the time of his retirement, he was the last remaining member of the original law faculty still teaching at the law school.  (Of course, that would also have been true had he retired in 1929.)

Rix never retired from the practice of law, and he died at his desk in his downtown Milwaukee law office on September 30, 1963.  At the time of his death, he was 85 years old, and the only surviving member of the original Marquette Law School faculty.

A photograph of Rix as well as a tribute based upon his many years of service to the American Bar Association can be found in the November 1963 issue of the American Bar Association Journal. (Vol. 49, page 1080.)

Continue ReadingThe Marquette Law Professor Who Was President of the American Bar Association

Marquette Law School’s Enduring Connection to the Sports Law Industry

As noted in an earlier post, the current issue of Marquette Lawyer magazine contains a profile of the current Marquette Sports Law program and the National Sports Law Institute. What the article fails to note, however, it that the law school’s involvement with the sports industry long pre-dates the founding of the National Sports Law Institute in 1989.

Marquette law students have gone on to careers as major league athletes and coaches; Marquette law graduates helped create the category of sports lawyer, and Marquette law professors have played important roles in the sports industry and in the creation of the academic discipline of sports law. And this was all before the Second World War.

Early in its history, when admission to the law school required less than four years of college, many Marquette law students competed on Marquette varsity sports teams, and a number of these ended up playing in the National Football League—including Green Bay Packer Hall-of-Famer LaVern “Lavvie” Dilweg, and fellow-Packers Larry McGinnis and Biff Taugher—and in the predecessor to the National Basketball League—including Frank Zummach (as a coach) and Ed “Boops” Mullen (as a player). Paul Robeson, who was never officially enrolled in the law school, reportedly studied with a Marquette law professor while playing for the NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers in the 1920’s, before he embarked on his better known careers in music, theater, and politics.

Future Congressman Ralph Metcalfe was a world class sprinter and an Olympic medal winner who also was enrolled in the law school in the 1930’s. And who can forget former Marquette law student and Hollywood actor Pat O’Brien? As a student, O’Brien unsuccessfully sought a spot on the Marquette football squad but later achieved a form of sports immortality by playing the lead role in “The Knute Rockne Story,” the film biography of the great Notre Dame football coach.

Raymond J. Cannon, a 1914 Marquette Law School graduate and a United States Congressman from 1933 to 1939, was arguably the first American lawyer to develop a sports-specific law practice, which he did in the late 1910’s and 1920’s. Cannon, also a star semi-pro baseball pitcher in Wisconsin from 1908-1922, was most famous for representing several of the so-called “Black Sox”–a group of eight Chicago White Sox players permanently expelled from Organized Baseball because of their involvement with efforts to fix the 1919 World Series–in their effort to recover unpaid salary and seek reinstatement.

Sympathetic to the plight of professional baseball players, whose occupational liberty he believed was unfairly restrained by the reserve clause, Cannon also attempted to organize a professional baseball players’ union. Called the National Baseball Players Association, Cannon’s organization was founded in 1922, while he was still much involved with the representation of the Black Sox.

Although many players from both the National and American leagues initially expressed enthusiasm for Cannon’s idea, few joined the new association, and the organization folded in 1924. Cannon’s simultaneous involvement with the Black Sox litigation and his continued representation of several of the group in the early 1920’s probably did not help matters. Most major league baseball players of that era were intimidated by the ruthlessly authoritarian tactics of baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis (a former Marquette Law School lecturer, discussed below), who appeared willing to ban players for life, even on the suspicion of association with gamblers.

After his involvement with the Black Sox cases ended, Cannon continued to represent legendary outfielder Shoeless Joe Jackson on a variety of matters for the remainder of his (Jackson’s) life.

Cannon’s sports-related practice also extended to boxing. In 1918, he began to work with Chicago boxing promoter, Tom Andrews, and did the legal work for a number of championship prize-fights, including Jack Dempsey matches with Fred Fulton, Jess Willard, and the Frenchman Georges Carpentier. In the early 1920’s, Cannon also became Dempsey’s personal lawyer, at a time that the fighter was the heavyweight boxing champion of the world and one of the best known celebrities in the United States. Among other services, Cannon helped Dempsey escape from an unfavorable managerial contract with John J. “John the Barber” Reiser, but his lawyer-client relationship with Dempsey ended later in the decade when he sued Dempsey for $20,000 in unpaid legal fees.

Cannon’s son, Robert C. Cannon, who graduated from the law school in 1941, was also a major figure in American sports. After a career as Milwaukee Circuit Court judge that began shortly after World War II, Cannon, a long time baseball fan, became the legal adviser and de facto director of the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1969, when he was chosen for that position after a national search by the players’ organization. Rather than resign from the bench, which he felt he would be required to do if he took a baseball salary, Cannon served for seven years as an active, but unpaid advisor to the Players Association.

Although Cannon was sometimes criticized as too sympathetic to the interests of the baseball owners to adequately represent the players, he was popular among both players and owners. In 1965, he was seriously considered for the position of Commissioner of Baseball when existing commissioner Ford Frick retired. Cannon eventually lost out to retired Air Force General William Eckert for the Commissioner position, but in 1966, he was offered and accepted the new post as full-time director of the Major League Baseball Players Association at a salary of $150,000. However, shortly after indicating he would be happy to accept the position, Cannon had second thoughts about leaving Milwaukee and his circuit court judgeship, and even though the Players Association offered to move its offices to Chicago, Cannon withdrew his acceptance. Having lost out on their first choice, the Players Association then turned to Marvin Miller. The rest, as they say, is history.

Marquette faculty members were also connected to the sports industry. The above-mentioned Kenesaw Mountain Landis taught at Marquette Law School as a lecturer in 1909 while he was a federal judge in Chicago. (He would not become Commissioner until 12 years later.) When current Commissioner Alvin “Bud” Selig joined the Marquette faculty this year as a Lecturer in Law, he filed a slot held 102 years earlier by his famous predecessor in his day job.

Elmer W. Roller, a 1923 graduate of Marquette Law School and a full-time Marquette law professor in the late 1920’s and 1930’s, suddenly became known to baseball fans all over the United States in 1965 when he almost kept the Milwaukee Braves from leaving town. (The new owners of the Braves had announced at the end of the 1964 season that they planned to be playing in Atlanta, Georgia, as early as 1966.)

As a Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge, Roller ruled that the team’s planned relocation to Atlanta violated the Wisconsin Antitrust Act in a way that warranted injunctive relief. Roller ordered the National League to keep the Braves in Milwaukee or else replace them with another team. Unfortunately for Brew City baseball fans, Roller was subsequently overruled by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and that decision was left standing by the United States Supreme Court in 1966.

Finally, the discipline of academic sports law really begins with two articles on the law of sports published in the Marquette Law Review in 1940 by legendary Marquette Law Professor, Carl Zollman. Although articles on the law of sports had been previously published in legal periodicals targeted to practitioners, these were the first two “academic articles” addressing sports law issues to appear in a law-school sponsored law review.

As I wrote in an earlier profile of Zollman:

Zollman’s final two law review articles, both of which appeared in the Marquette Law Review in 1940, were entitled “Baseball Peonage” and “Injuries from Flying Baseballs to Spectators at Ball Games.” The first was a study of baseball labor relations which focused on the restrictive nature of Organized Baseball’s reserve system, which Zollman actually thought was reasonable, and the second was an early examination of one of the classic problems in sports law. The two articles, particularly the first, reflect a detailed knowledge of the structure and history of professional baseball and suggest that Zollman must have been a long-time fan.

Given this history, it was entirely appropriate that the National Sports Law Institute was established at the Marquette Law School in 1989. It is too bad that so little of this history is currently acknowledged by the law school or the sports law program. Unfortunately, law schools tend to have short memories.

 

Continue ReadingMarquette Law School’s Enduring Connection to the Sports Law Industry