Marquette Takes a Different Path on Grades

At the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year, the Marquette University Law School adopted a new grading system. A more conventional set of “plus” and “minus” grades replaced the previous A, AB, B, BC, C, D, F system that appears to be unique to Marquette University. Also, for larger classes, the Law School adopted a rule requiring a mandatory mean grade point average of 3.0, in lieu of the previous requirement of a median grade of B.

The new system has had the effect of lowering the overall GPA of the student body, although the experience of the first year has shown that the effect may not be as great as some (including this writer) anticipated.

In tightening up its grading system, Marquette is moving in a quite different direction than many American law schools.

According to Monday’s New York Times, at least ten ABA-accredited law schools, including Georgetown, NYU, and Tulane, have raised their overall grades to make their students appear more competitive on the job market.

Loyola of Los Angeles has gone farther than anyone, raising every grade awarded over the last several years by 0.333 points. For most Loyola students, this means a retroactive GPA jump of a third of a grade point. In other words, a student with a 3.2 GPA before the new policy took effect now has a GPA of 3.533, without having had to do anything to obtain the improvement. (In Loyola’s defense, its previous mean first-year GPA of 2.67 was one of the lowest in the United States.)

Whether or not employers will be fooled by such grade manipulations is open to question.

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Remembering Marquette Law School’s First Female Students

During the past academic year Marquette University staged a year-long celebration marking the 100th anniversary of president James J. McCabe’s 1909 decision to open the doors of the university to women.  In doing so, Marquette became the first Roman Catholic university in the world to admit women to its regular undergraduate program.

However, when the first undergraduate females were admitted in 1909, women were already present on the Marquette campus, thanks to the co-educational policies of the university’s newly acquired law and medical schools.

Marquette acquired the previously private Milwaukee Medical College in 1907.  At the time of the acquisition, the medical college already had six female students, as well as a non-degree-granting nursing program that was exclusively female.  However, the Medical College classes remained in their own building, so the university’s primary academic building, Johnston Hall, remained an all-male preserve.

The gender integration of Johnston Hall came the following spring when the university completed negotiations to take over the independent Milwaukee Law School.

Women had a small but well-established presence at the Milwaukee Law School at the time of the merger.  The school, which opened in 1893, had admitted female students as early as 1897, when 2 of 45 students were female.  (Pre-1897 enrollment information is not available, and neither of the two students in 1897 were ever admitted to the bar.)  However, from 1900 through 1904, all of the school’s students were male.  In 1905, the school enrolled two female students and the number increased to three for the 1906 and 1907 academic years.

Marquette’s takeover of the Milwaukee Law School actually took place near the end of the 1907-1908 academic year.  Once the merger agreement was signed, the students of the Milwaukee Law School left their downtown building and moved into Johnston Hall.  Among the students making the trek were Katherine Williams, Leola Hirschmann, and Amalia L. Pryne—who together qualify as the first female law students at Marquette University.  All three had begun taking classes at the Milwaukee Law School in the fall of 1905, and each was still enrolled in the spring of 1908.

Whether or not all three enrolled in the law school the following fall is unclear.  The Report of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1908-09 reported three female students attending the school, but the Law School Bulletin published at the end of 1909 listed only Williams and Hirschmann, both of whom were enrolled in the evening division.  Marquette now operated a law school with two divisions, and under the new arrangement the day division operated as a full-time university law school with classes held during the mornings.

Law degrees were awarded to students who completed the three-year curriculum with a certain level of academic performance.  Students in the evening division continued with the curriculum of the Milwaukee Law School (which was less extensive than that of the day division) and were awarded law degrees once they passed the Wisconsin bar examination.  (Before 1934, the diploma privilege applied only to the University of Wisconsin Law School.)  Under this approach, 84 “retroactive” law degrees were awarded to former Milwaukee Law School students at the 1909 Commencement.

The First Female Graduates

The distinction of being the first woman to receive a law degree from Marquette University went to Katherine Williams who passed the Wisconsin bar examination in 1909, and in doing so became the 23rd female lawyer in the state’s history.  The following spring, she was awarded an “honorary” law degree from Marquette on the basis of her completion of the evening law curriculum and her admission to the bar.  She was also a featured speaker at the 1910 Marquette Commencement. Although the trio of Williams, Hirschmann, and Pryne had all completed their formal legal education by the end of the 1909 academic year, only Williams ever secured admission to the bar and thus was the only one of the three to receive a Marquette law degree.

How to classify the degrees awarded to those who had attended law school at night and then passed the Wisconsin bar examination was something of a problem in the early years of the law school and the “honorary” designation was one of several ways in which the degrees from the evening division were distinguished from those earned during the day.  (Ultimately, a total of 144 “honorary” degrees were awarded.)

Williams had already earned a certain level of prominence as an educator before she was admitted to the bar.  She had been teaching in the Milwaukee public schools for several years, and in 1908, she served as the Secretary of the Wisconsin Teachers Association.

After receiving her law degree Williams continued her career as a social activist and an educator.  After her admission to the bar she served as president of the Milwaukee Teachers Association, and in 1912, she spoke at the annual meeting of the National Conference of Catholic Charities on the subject of “The Poor as Victims of Their More and Social Environment.”  The program identified her as a member of the Board of Control of Wisconsin, chairman of the Committee of Civics and Philanthropy of the Marquette Women’s League, and a former member of the Milwaukee Tuberculosis Commission.  She subsequently went on to a very prominent career in Wisconsin and Milwaukee where she practiced law for many years with the firm of Stem, Murphy & O’Brien.

Williams was a devout Roman Catholic and a devoted member of the Republican Party, and she was active with both institutions.  She served as president of the Milwaukee Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women from 1923 until 1941, and in 1926, she received two papal decorations from Pope Leo XIII.  She also served as secretary of the Associate Republican State Central Committee.  She was chosen to represent Wisconsin on the board of the International Union of Women Advocates in 1929, and in 1938, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in law degree by Mount Mary College.  She died in 1942.

Unfortunately Leola Hirschmann and Amalia Pryne quickly dropped out of the accounts of the history of women in law in Milwaukee.  When Williams died in 1942, the Wisconsin Bar Bulletin referred to her as the first female law student at Marquette (as did the university’s 2009 exhibit on the history of woman at the university).  Nowhere was there any acknowledgement that she had female classmates.  The two women also escaped the notice of the university’s historians. Both Father Hamilton and Thomas Jablonsky, the two preeminent historians of Marquette University, failed to note their status as the first female law students, as did law school historians Robert Boden and Michael Mazza.

Although Leola Hirschmann was never admitted to the Wisconsin bar, she went on to a distinguished career in public life.  She became actively involved with the Milwaukee Woman’s Trade Union League, the Wisconsin League of Women voters, and the National Council of Jewish women, and in the 1920’s, she served a term as one of the regents of the University of Wisconsin.  Her direct involvement with the legal profession was as a legal secretary, rather than a lawyer.  She worked for many years for Milwaukee lawyer William B. Rubin, a prominent and sometimes controversial labor lawyer and socialist politician.

Much less is known about the subsequent career of Amalia Pryne.  Pryne graduated from high school in Oshkosh in 1901, and as class prophet, she predicted that class valedictorian Mabel Currie would become a great woman lawyer and later attorney general.  (Of course, it was she, not Currie, who later studied law.)  She was never admitted to the bar in Wisconsin, and she died sometime before 1931 (when her estate was involved in an action to quiet title to a parcel of land in Oshkosh).  It also appears that she relocated at some point to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where she left part of her estate to establish a charitable trust bearing her name.  As late as the 1960’s, newspapers in that part of Michigan contain references to a Amalia L. Pryne scholarship and the Amalia L. Payne Charity Trust.

The second female graduate of the law school was Marie Desrosiers, whose degree later turned out to be the subject of some controversy.  Desrosiers began as an evening student in 1909—the year following the departure of the first three women—and she spent the next three years in the evening division.  At some point after the 1911-12 academic year she “transferred” to the day division and received the LL.B. degree awarded to day students in 1914.  The legitimacy of Desrosiers’ degree was one of the questions that Marquette had to address specifically when it defended itself before the AALS in 1916.

(In 1916, there was an effort to expel Marquette from the Association of American Law Schools, initiated by the University of Wisconsin, on the grounds that it admitted unqualified students as degree candidates and that it awarded degrees to those who were undeserving of such an honor.  The charges were subsequently dropped.)  In 1917, Ida Luick became the third woman to graduate from the Marquette Law School after completing most of her coursework in the evening division.  Luick practiced in Milwaukee until 1970, specializing in probate matters.

The first female to receive a law degree from Marquette while attending classes exclusively in the day division was Geraldine McMullen, who graduated in 1920.  (Until recently, her class photo hung in the hallway of the first floor of Sensenbrenner Hall.)  McMullen practiced law in Milwaukee almost to the time of her death in 1984.

Of course, it has been a long time since female law students were a novelty at the Marquette Law School, although the appearance of women in large numbers is a more recent phenomenon than many realize.  As late as 1967, only 8 of 260 Marquette law students were female, and it was not until the late 1970’s that the number of female students began to approach that of their male counterparts.

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John McDill Fox and the Idea of Catholic Legal Education

John McDill Fox was the first member of the Marquette Law School faculty to have attended Harvard Law School and the first to be hired as a dean at another law school.  With his colleague Carl Zollman, he founded the academic field of aviation law, and unlike his faculty colleagues at Marquette, he believed that there should be such a thing as a distinctive “Catholic” legal education.

Fox was born in Milwaukee on January 3, 1891.  Both of his parents had deep ties to the legal and political history of Wisconsin.  His father, Dr. William Fox, was a surgeon and the grandnephew of William Fox, one of the signers of the 1848 Wisconsin Constitution.  His mother, Narcissa McDill, was the daughter of Alexander McDill, a former Wisconsin congressman.

Fox was initially educated in public schools in Milwaukee, but at age nine, he was sent away to enroll in the preparatory department at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.  At age 14, he moved up to the college and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1909.  After graduating, he accepted a position as a teacher at St. Edward’s College, a small Roman Catholic institution in Austin, Texas.  Even by the standards of the early twentieth century, becoming a college professor at age 18 was quite precocious, although it is likely that Fox taught primarily in the school’s college preparatory division.

In the fall of 1910, he enrolled at Harvard Law School where he was a member of the John Marshall Law Club (an organization that sponsored moot court competitions but was essentially social) and one of the founders of the Harvard University Wisconsin Club.  He graduated in 1913, and was admitted to the bar in Massachusetts.  He began practice in Boston, initially as a lawyer in the offices of the firm of Whipple, Sears, and Ogden, a prominent local law firm.  However, after a year there, he began his own practice, specializing in admiralty law.  In 1914, he married Elsa Sonnenmann, the daughter of a Neenah, Wisconsin tobacconist who had emigrated to Wisconsin from Germany after the turn of the century.

In 1916, the Foxes returned to Milwaukee, and after securing admission to the Wisconsin bar in June, Fox established his own admiralty law practice in the city.  In the spring of 1919, Fox was hired to teach a course in maritime law at the Marquette Law School.  That same year, new Association of American Law School rules required all member schools to have at least three full-time faculty.  Because Marquette had previously relied upon a full-time dean (in 1919, Max Schoetz) and part-time faculty, it was necessary to appoint two new full-time faculty members.  One of the appointments went to Fox. (The other went to the little remembered Willis Lang.)

From 1919 to 1930, Fox taught a variety of courses at the law school.  He also served as faculty adviser to the law review for many years, and regularly published book reviews for that publication.  He also contributed a number of articles to the journal on topics ranging from trusts to chattel mortgages, and from bar admissions to the role of law review articles in litigation.  In the 1920’s, Fox and his colleague Carl Zollman developed the field of aviation law as a serious academic discipline (although most of the scholarly writing was done by Zollman).

Fox was also the teacher of a popular bar review course in an era when the diploma privilege had not been extended to Marquette (and, in fact, both Fox and Marquette Dean Max Schoetz wanted the diploma privilege abolished).  It appears that in the fall of 1923, Fox also tutored the famous athlete, performer, civil rights activist, and then law student Paul Robeson, who was on leave from Columbia Law School so that he could play football for the Milwaukee Badgers, then a member of the National Football League.

Although Mrs. Fox was a Lutheran, Fox himself was a devout Roman Catholic, a member of the Knights of Columbus, and a frequent speaker on Catholic subjects.  While he did not publish his views on the topic during his time at Marquette, Fox had strong views on the subject of Catholic legal education.  An advocate of a distinctive Catholic approach to law study, this position placed him somewhat at odds with his colleagues Schoetz and Zollman.  Although a Catholic himself, Schoetz regularly pointed to the non-denominational character of the law school, emphasizing that while Marquette University was a Catholic institution, the law school was not.  (Zollman, the author of several works on the law of religious institutions, was also an ordained Lutheran minister.)  When Schoetz was killed in a collision with a railroad train while on his way to the 1927 Law School Commencement, apparently no thought was given to replacing him with a Roman Catholic, and the position instead went to Schoetz’s law partner, Clifton Williams, who was a Quaker.

In 1930, the Catholic University of Washington, D.C., which was committed to the idea of a distinctive Roman Catholic form of legal education, had an opening for a dean, and Fox was offered the position.  The June 19, 1930 article in the Milwaukee Journal reporting that Fox had accepted the position also noted that Fox planned to retain his house in Milwaukee where he would spend the summers.

Catholic University had spent the previous two years searching for an appropriate dean, and the university’s rector, Bishop James H. Ryan, was initially delighted with the choice of Fox, reporting to the university trustees “that the Law School has again been put on the road originally outlined by the late Dean Robinson, to produce a learned, scholarly, and cultured Catholic bar.”  At the time of his appointment the law school at Catholic University was on life support.  It was clearly the least successful school in the District of Columbia, and in the year prior to Fox’s appointment, it had neither admitted a new student nor graduated an existing one.

As dean, Fox dramatically raised the law school’s standards.  He instituted a requirement that all entering students have a baccalaureate degree, at a time when only seven other law schools had such a requirement.  (Marquette, like most law schools in 1930, required two years of college work for entering students.)  He also increased the requirements for graduation and required all students to spend at least 18 hours a week in the law library.  He abolished the moot court, but replaced it with a law club and a legal aid society.

In regard to making the law school more scholarly and more distinctively Roman Catholic, he incorporated the Washington-based Riccobono Seminar of Roman Law into the law school.  He also placed a new emphasis on the development of what he called “theophilosophical” jurisprudence as the underpinning of the law course at Catholic University.

Writing to one of his former professors, Harvard Law School’s Joseph Beale, shortly after assuming the office of dean, Fox observed: “This being a Catholic University, we are stressing wherever possible Scholastic Philosophy and Neo scholasticism. We feel that there has been no attempt on the part of the Catholic law schools to do anything in this regard heretofore, except possibly by certain selected courses in what is usually called “natural law,” or “Jurisprudence.” Our plan is to integrate what we can into the various courses, rather than segregate the subject matter.”  Although he did not mention Marquette in his letter to Beale, he was clearly describing his former university which did in most years offer a course on national law taught by a priest from the Marquette Theology Department.

Fox’s activities at Catholic University were not limited to religious matters.  He established an aviation law institute at Catholic and served on the Aeronautical Law Committee of the American Bar Association.  Additionally, in 1932, he was one of the founders of the Academy of World Economics in Washington, D.C., and he later served on the National Council on Naturalization and Citizenship

Unfortunately, Fox’s effort to turn his new law school into a Roman Catholic Harvard fell victim to his problems with alcohol which apparently plagued him throughout his adult life.  In 1934, he was placed on probation by the University because of issues related to excessive drinking, and when the problems persisted, he was asked to resign in 1935.   When he failed to do so, he was discharged, and the locks were changed on his office door at the order of the same university rector who had praised his appointment five years earlier.  To the embarrassment of both Fox and the university, the “locking out of his office” incident was widely publicized by newspapers throughout the region.

After his discharge as dean, Fox remained in Washington and went to work as a trial examiner for the Food and Drug Administration.  He issued a number of important rulings in that capacity, and was still in that position when he died unexpectedly on April 18, 1940, at the age of 49.  He was survived by his wife and three daughters.

By the time of his death, he appeared to be largely forgotten at Marquette, although the Marquette Law School had actually taken a “Catholic turn” in 1934 with the appointment as dean of Francis Xavier Swietlik, who held undergraduate, graduate, and law degrees from Marquette.

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