Supreme Court Justices Who Have Visited Marquette Law School

United States Supreme Court Justice Antonia Scalia’s appearance as the keynote speaker at the dedication of Eckstein Hall this past September was a great honor for both Marquette University and the Law School.

However, it was by no means the first visit of a United States Supreme Court justice to the law school.  In fact, it was not even Justice Scalia’s first visit.  In 1997, he delivered the annual Hallows Lecture, that year entitled,”A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law.”

The record is not entirely clear when a Supreme Court Justice first visited the law school.

In August of 1909, Justice David Brewer (pictured at the top) came to Milwaukee to address the annual meeting of the Northwestern Life Insurance Company, and while here Brewer almost certainly visited his friend James Jenkins.  The two men had known each other as fellow federal judges for many years, and they had served together on the American Bar Association special committee that drafted the original Canons of Ethics which were promulgated in 1908.  In 1909, Jenkins was, of course, the dean of the Marquette Law School.

On the other hand, in August 1909, the law school was in summer recess—the last classes had been held on June 24, and the 1909-1910 academic year did not begin until September 13.  Moreover, there was no separate law school building in 1909.  The Mackie Mansion would be taken over by the law school in 1910, but prior to that classes were held in Johnston Hall. So it is hard to know if Brewer actually visited the “law school” and if he did, it would have been while classes were not in session.

In August 1912, Marquette sponsored a reception for the Association of American Law Schools which was meeting in Milwaukee in conjunction with the American Bar Association.  Present at the meeting was future Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone.  Stone was then the dean of the Columbia Law School, so it seems likely that he would have attended the reception and may have visited the law school as well.  (Future Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland was also a speaker at the 1912 ABA meeting in Milwaukee.)

Later that year President (and future Supreme Court Justice) William Howard Taft visited the Marquette campus during his reelection campaign and likely visited the law school as well.  (At the time the law school was in the Mackie Mansion which was on the site now occupied by Sensenbrenner Hall.)

The first documented visit by a sitting Supreme Court justice to the law school came in 1958 when Justice Tom Clark delivered an address in honor of the law school’s 50th Anniversary.  Clark’s address was entitled, “The Supreme Court as the Protecter [sic] of Liberty Under Law.”  This visit occurred during the deanship of Reynolds Seitz.

Clark was the first of three Warren Court justices to visit the law school between 1958 and 1968. In 1965, William Brennan was the speaker at the annual Law Review banquet, and three years later, William O. Douglas appeared at the ceremony marking the opening of the new law library.

More recently, Chief Justice William Rehnquist was the 1988 Marquette University Commencement speaker.  As mentioned above, Justice Scalia delivered the 1997 Hallows Lecture, and in 2008, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor appeared at law school for a Mike Gousha interview.

For now, that appears to be the complete list of Supreme Court justice visits, although it seems possible that other justices may have visited law school between 1912 and 1958, but that records of those visits have not yet surfaced.

For example, Justice Pierce Butler, who was Roman Catholic and who served on the Supreme Court in the 1920’s and 1930’s, regularly passed through Milwaukee on his way from Washington to his home in Minneapolis.  It would be no great surprise to learn that somewhere along the line Justice Butler paid a visit to the law school.

The remarks delivered by several justices on the occasion of their visits to Marquette have been published in the Marquette Law Review.  These include:

Justice Clark  (43 Marq. L. Rev. 11)

Justice Brennan (48 Marq. L. Rev. 437)

Chief Justice Rehnquist (72 Marq. L. Rev. 145)

I owe a special debt of thanks to our alumnus Daniel Suhr for the idea for this post and for his assistance in collecting this information.

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Origins of Native American Team Names, Part II

I am trying to track down the history of “Indian” team names among professional sports teams in North America.  I am particularly interested in the period before 1897 when the success of major league outfielder Louis Sockalexis, the travelling Nebraska Indians baseball team, and the baseball and football teams of the Carlisle Indian School produced an equation in many American’s minds between athletic success and Native American ethnicity.

I know that many, mostly amateur, pre-1876 nines used Indian names for their clubs–I am relying upon Marshall Wright’s list of clubs in his history of baseball before 1870 for this assertion–and that most 19th-century nicknames for professional clubs were unofficial.

(The incorporation of the territorial exclusivity principle into professional baseball in 1876 made team names less necessary, since there could be only one Boston team in the National League or, for that matter, only one New Castle, Pennsylvania team in the minor-league Iron and Oil Association.)

Based upon the information on team names in the Baseball America’s Minor League Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., it appears that the practice of identifying professional baseball teams by Indian names largely began in 1887 (interestingly, during the season following the passage of the Dawes Act in February 1887).  That year, one finds teams like the Oneida Indians, the Wichita Braves, the Springfield (Mo.) Indians, the Fort Smith Indians, the Scranton Indians, and the Zanesville Kickapoos.

(I don’t count the London (Ont.) Tecumsehs of the International Association of 1877 and 1878 as a team with a Native American name, because that club was named after an individual Native American who was at the time treated as a Canadian national hero.  Portraits of Tecumseh in a red British general’s uniform were not uncommon in 19th-century Canada.)

It is easy to understand why Indian names would be attached to teams in towns like Oneida and Wichita since those are tribal names as well as city names.  I suppose that in the 1880’s places like Springfield, Missouri and Fort Smith, Arkansas were still close enough to their frontier origins (and to Indian Territory) that people might still associate Native Americans with those communities.

However, I have no idea why a team in Scranton would be called the Indians, especially since the same team was also referred to as the Miners, which makes sense given that Scranton was so closely linked to the anthracite coal industry.

I do know that local histories of Scranton in the late 19th century emphasized that the land on which the city was situated had been purchased by William Penn from the Delaware Indians (and Scranton’s county has an Indian name, Lackawanna), but presumably similar stories could be told for most American communities.  Perhaps there been an earlier, amateur club in Scranton called the “Indian Baseball Club” and the name somehow got attached to the town’s first professional team.

Most baffling is the team known as the Zanesville Kickapoos.  The Kickapoo were a real tribe, but by the 1880’s they had long been relocated to the west.  Moreover, their Midwestern base had been in western Indiana, not eastern Ohio, and there is, as far as I can tell, no reason to associate them with Zanesville.  Maybe it was a hidden reference to the team’s penchant for “kicking” (complaining), or possibly local sportswriters thought the name sounded funny and thus adopted it.  But that is just a guess.

Rosters for the 1887 Scranton and Zanesville teams can be found in the Baseball-Reference.com database, but none of the players on those teams have obviously Native American names.

On a related note, one of the truly bizarre team names in the history of minor league baseball is the Terre Haute Hottentots.  (Hottentot is a European-coined term for certain native tribal groups in southwestern Africa, and its usage is almost always viewed as derogatory.)

The name became associated with the Terre Haute team when it returned to the professional ranks in the early 1890’s.  It was apparently used to describe all of Terre Haute’s entries in various mid-western leagues until 1910 when the team name was changed to “Stags.”  However, the Hottentot name was revived in 1921 as “Tots” and was used continuously until the Terre Haute franchise went out of business after the 1937 season.

I can find nothing that discusses the origins of the name, or how it came to be attached to the Terre Haute team.  However, my suspicion is that it refers in a good-humored, racist way to the Terre Haute team’s previous employment of noted black baseball players Bud Fowler and Moses Fleetwood Walker.  Fowler played with the team in 1888, and Walker, a former major-league catcher, participated in the 1890 pre-season, but apparently did not play in any regular season games.

Moreover, “Hottentot” sounds a little bit like “Haute and Terra” and there is a certain alliterative quality to “Terre Haute Hottentots.”  Such things may have passed for humor in late 19th-century Indiana.

Comments on any of this would be much appreciated.

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Another Set-Back for the United States on the Stage of International Sports

FIFA, the organization that manages world soccer, has just announced that the 2018 World Cup will be held in Russia and that the honor of hosting the 2022 event will go to tiny Qatar. The U.S. had made an aggressive bid to host the 2022 games, and it was considered the favorite to win the competition for that event over Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Qatar, the other bidders. Sports Business Daily has already called the decision “another devastating blow to the U.S. on the global sports stage.”

The U.S. effort was directed by United States Soccer Federation President Sunil Gulati, who is a native of India and also a professor at Columbia University. Aiding in the effort were former President Bill Clinton, who appeared before the selection committee, and current President Barack Obama, who appeared via video message. Actor Morgan Freeman also played a major role in the U.S. presentation. Apparently the cosmopolitan composition of the U.S. team was not enough to carry the day. In many ways, the loss of the 2022 World Cup was even more embarrassing than the U.S. team’s loss to Ghana in this year’s competition.

This is the second major organizational setback in two years for the United States, following its failure to obtain the 2016 Olympic Games. Allegations that the deck was fixed against the United States in regard to the World Cup have already surfaced. On Thursday morning (today), Sports Illustrated’s soccer columnist Grant Wahl posted a column on SI.com entitled: “Choice of Russia and Qatar as hosts raises questions of FIFA integrity.”

Whatever the reason for the decision it is now apparent that the ability of the United States to influence international sports authorities is at an all-time low.

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