In 1938, Jim Ghiardi transferred to Marquette University after his sophomore year at Northern State College (now Northern Michigan University) in Marquette, Michigan.  A year later, Jim enrolled in the Marquette University Law School under a program that allowed Marquette students to count their first year of law school as the final year of their undergraduate education.  Jim received his Ph.B. degree in 1940 and his law degree in 1942. The following is a description of the law school at the time of his initial enrollment in the fall of 1939.

The Law School

By 1939, Marquette University Law School had been training lawyers in Milwaukee for more than 45 years, and the school had been officially part of Marquette University since 1908.  Since 1924, all law school classes had been taught at the Law School Building (now known as Sensenbrenner Hall) which replaced an earlier building on the same site.

In 1939, the law school boasted an enrollment of 248 students and a faculty of ten, plus four “special lecturers” and law librarian Agnes Kendergan.  In addition, the Rev. Joseph A. Ormsby, S. J., served as the Regent of the Law School. Although the law school had originally offered instruction primarily in the evening, the evening division was terminated in 1924, and the last evening class was offered in 1927.

As an institution, Marquette University Law School was squarely in the mainstream of American legal education.  The school had been admitted to the Association of American Law Schools in 1912, and in 1925, shortly after the American Bar Association began to accredit law schools, it won ABA accreditation.  Historically, Marquette Law School graduates were required to take the Wisconsin bar examination to practice law in the state, but in 1933, after a long and sometimes bitter contest with the University of Wisconsin, the “diploma privilege” was extended to Marquette graduates.

Admission and Degrees

To secure admission to the law school, applicants had to be 18 years of age and must have completed three years of college.  There is no evidence that anyone who met these qualifications was turned down in 1939, but this was true for virtually every American law school before the Second World War.

Marquette students in 1939 had the option of pursuing two different types of law degrees—the bachelor of laws and the juris doctor.   Marquette was one of several American law schools that used this distinction to provide recognition for students who entered law school with college degrees (which were required only at a handful of schools) and who performed extremely well while in law school.  This two law degree program had been adopted at Marquette during the 1925-26 academic year.

The standard law degree was the bachelor of laws (LL.B.), which was the equivalent of today’s J.D. degree.  To earn this degree students had to complete 85 hours of law courses, including 4 hours of Office Practice and 4 hours of Moot Court, with an average grade of 77.  (In 1939, the law school was in the process of changing its grading system.  The school had previously used the traditional letter system, but beginning with the class that entered in 1938, students were graded on a numerical basis ranging from 60 to 100.  Ninety-three or better was considered an A, and cumulative averages of 71 and 74 were required to continue after the first and second years, respectively.)

The second degree was the juris doctor, or J.D., degree.  For it, students were required to have entered law school with an undergraduate degree, to complete the requirements for the LL.B. with an average grade of 88 (which was in the middle of the B range), and to prepare and submit an acceptable thesis by May 1 of their final year.  The thesis, if accepted, became “the property of the School and at the direction of the Dean [could] be published.”  By 1940, the J.D. was clearly passing out of fashion among Marquette law students.  Although the degree was awarded to 67 students between 1926 and 1937, no one earned the degree in 1938, and the last two recipients received the degree in 1939.  The J.D. degree remained on the books for several more years but was eventually discontinued sometime between 1942 and 1945.

The Academic Calendar

In 1939, the academic year started and ended much later than it does today.  Law School classes did not begin until September 26, and the first semester examinations did not end until February 2, 1940.  The second semester began on February 6 with graduation on June 12.

Tuition for the regular academic year was $230 — although those who opted for payment on the installment plan had to pay an additional four dollars — and board and lodging could be found in the vicinity of the law school for an estimated $7.50 per week.  Third year students who were also candidates for the law degree had to pay an additional $12.50 diploma fee.

The Student Body in 1939

The 248 students enrolled at the law school during the 1939-40 academic year included 76 Seniors (third-year students), 72 Juniors, 97 Freshmen, and 3 Special Students.  (Special students were enrolled in classes but were not candidates for degrees.)

All 97 students in the 1939 freshman class were male, although this was something of an aberration as there were two women in the senior class and three in the junior.

Eighty-seven of the 97 freshmen students were from Wisconsin, and 58 were from Milwaukee proper.   Nine of the 10 out-of-state students were from the Midwest, including Jim Ghiardi, who was from Negaunee, Michigan.  The only student with a hometown outside the Midwest was Jim’s future faculty colleague Ray Aiken, whose parents lived in Jacksonville, Florida.  Only 18 members of the class were listed as having earned undergraduate degrees prior to beginning law school, although several, like Jim, earned their bachelor’s degree at the end of their first year of law school.

The Law School Curriculum 

The University Bulletin for 1939-40 described the law school’s method of instruction as the “case method,” which it asserted “inculcates habits of accurate reasoning.”  However, the same document also emphasized that the faculty neglected “neither the purely scientific nor the practical element of legal education” and noted that special attention was given to Wisconsin law.

To earn the law degree students had to pass 85 credit hours of courses, most of which were required.  All of the first-year classes—which included four year-long courses and five that lasted one semester—were required and counted for 34 of the 85 credit hours.  Each class was taught in a single section.

Students in the fall of 1939 had Dean Francis X. Swietlik for Contracts, Professor Otto Reis for Torts and for Agency, Prof. J. Walter McKenna for Criminal Law and Procedure, Prof. Francis A. Darnieder for Introduction to Law, Prof. Willis E. Lang for Personal Property, and the Rev. Joseph A. Ormsby, S.J., for Natural Law and Jurisprudence.  In the spring, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law and Procedure, and Natural Law and Jurisprudence continued with the same instructors, but Lang’s Personal Property course was replaced by one on Domestic Relations (also taught by Lang).  The final spring semester course was Domestic Relations taught by Prof. Carl Zollman.  All of the professors, except for Rev. Ormsby, were full-time law professors.  The first-year curriculum is set out below:

Semester 1

Contracts (3 hrs)

Torts (3 hrs.)

Criminal Law and Procedure (2 hrs.)

Natural Law and Jurisprudence (2 hrs.)

Introduction to Law (3 hrs.)

Personal Property (2 hrs.)

Agency (2 hrs.)

Semester 2

Contracts (3 hrs.)

Torts (3 hrs.)

Criminal Law and Procedure (2 hrs.)

Natural Law and Jurisprudence (2 hrs.)

Domestic Relations (3 hrs.)

Sales (2 hrs.)

Eleven additional courses—eight of which were year-long courses—were mandated for Second and Third Year students, for a total of 42 credit hours.  Altogether, the required courses counted for 74 of the 85 credit hours necessary for the degree.  The remaining hours could be obtaining by choosing among 12 elective courses.  The 1939-40 upper level curriculum is set out below:

Upper Level Required Courses

Bills and Notes

Real Property (2 sem.)

Constitutional Law (2 sem.)

Trusts

Equity (2 sem.)

Wills and Probate (2 sem.)

Evidence (2 sem.)

Office Practice (2 sem.)

Legal Ethics

Moot Court (2 sem.)

Business Associations (2 sem.)

Elective Courses

Administrative Law

Future Interests

Code Pleading (2 sem.)

Insurance

Code Practice (2 sem.)

*Municipal Corporations

*Conflict of Laws

Quasi-Contracts

Creditors’ Rights

Security (Suretyship) (2 sem.)

Federal Jurisdiction

Taxation

* Offered every other year.  Note:  Code Pleading and Code Practice became required courses in 1940-41.

The Faculty 

The law faculty in 1939 consisted of the six full-time professors mentioned above (including Dean Swietlik) and four part-time instructors:  Rev. Ormsby, who also taught in the Philosophy Department, Thomas P. Whelan, who was also an instructor in the English Department, and Milwaukee lawyers E. Harold Hallows and Carl B. Rix.  (Hallows was a future chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and Rix, a future president of the American Bar Association.)  All but Ormsby were law school graduates who had spent time practicing law in Milwaukee.

The University Bulletin described the members of the law faculty in 1939 as “men who not only take high rank at the bar, but who have been trained in the best universities and law schools of the country.  Such men possess not only the wide empirical knowledge of the practical lawyer in a large city, but also the broad, comprehensive basis of theory and method which is indispensable to the successful teacher.”

Several of the full-time faculty members carried extraordinarily heavy course loads, at least by modern standards.  Swietlik, who had been dean since 1935, taught seven required courses for a total of 15 credit hours.   The real workhorse of the faculty in 1939-40, however, was J. Walter McKenna who taught ten courses (four of which were required).  Francis Darnieder and Willis Lang each taught seven courses; Otto Reis taught five; and Carl Zollman, the best known scholar on the faculty, taught only four.

The part-time faculty members carried much lighter loads.  E. Harold Hallows taught three classes and Rev. Ormsby taught two.  Carl B. Rix taught only a single course, but it was the course devoted to future interests and the Rule Against Perpetuities.  Francis Whalen was listed in the 1939 catalog as a law professor but actually taught no courses that year.

Student Life

The only law school-specific activity listed in the Law School Announcement was the Marquette Law Review.  However, law students were encouraged to take active interest in the University Band, the University Choir, the University Chorus, the University Symphony Orchestra, intramural sports, and the various social, dramatic, literary, debating, and religious organizations.  In a report to University President Raphael McCarthy, S. J., in 1939, Dean Swietlik noted that the law school was concerned about the social life of its students and thus regularly sponsored “smokers,” annual dances including the Barristers Ball, and an end-of-the-year banquet for the law students, the faculty, the Milwaukee bar, and the Wisconsin judiciary.

Legal fraternities also played an important role in the social life of the law school.  Fraternities in 1939 included Delta Theta Phi, which had its own building, Phi Delta Phi, and Tau Epsilon Rho, a fraternity for Jewish law students.

According to the University yearbook, the Hilltop, “extracurricular activities [were] prominent in the law school,” and students were encouraged to participate “in organized religious and social movements for the common welfare of their fellows.”  While the law school acknowledged the importance of “the development of the social side of the student’s character,” its official publication cautioned: “No student activity is allowed to interfere with study.”

The Subsequent Law School Experiences of the Class of 1942 

In spite of the reportedly grueling nature of the first year of law school at Marquette, ninety percent (88 of the 97) freshmen students in 1939-40 returned for their second year in the fall of 1940.  A similar percentage of second-year students (79 of 88) returned for the third year of law school in 1941.

It was during a three-day break for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception during the fall semester of 1941 that Marquette law students learned of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  The likelihood of military call ups prompted Marquette to accelerate its Spring 1942 schedule, and in May, 69 members of the class received law degrees.  (Two of the 69 had actually finished even earlier so that they could enter military service.)

The law school awards announced at the 1942 Commencement were dominated by future Marquette law professors Ray Aiken, who received the award for the highest three-year grade average, and Jim Ghiardi, who received the award for the best performance during the third year of law school.

Sources:  Miscellaneous files, Marquette University Archives; Francis X. Swietlik, “History of Marquette University Law School” (unpublished manuscript, 1939); Marquette University Bulletin: Announcement of the Law School for the Session 1939-40; 1940-41; 1941-42; 1942-43; Interview with Prof. James A. Ghiardi, May 2007.  This essay was originally written for the 2007 program honoring Jim Ghiardi’s 61 years on the Marquette Law School faculty.

Although the career of Mabel Raimey, the first black woman to attend Marquette Law School is well documented — see Phoebe Williams’ wonderful article in the  Marquette Law Review — we do not know with certainty the name of the first African-American male.

For the post-1908 period, when the Milwaukee Law School became part of Marquette University, Eugene W. Scott appears to be a likely candidate for the institution’s first African-American student.  Scott was one of the 46 first-year students enrolled in the Law School’s day program in the fall of 1911.  (One of his classmates was future dean Francis X. Swietlik.)  He is also one of 35 students listed as “Day Juniors” in the following year’s College of Law bulletin.  His photograph also appears as “E. W. Scott” in the Class of 1914 group picture which currently hangs in the hallway outside the Dean’s Office on the first floor of Sensenbrenner Hall.

There is also evidence that Scott did well as a student at Marquette.

His picture appeared in the July 1913 edition of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association of Colored People, with the note that he was competing for the senior oratorical prize.   However, in spite of his photograph appearing in the above-mentioned class picture, he is not listed among the 18 individuals who received law degrees at the 1914 commencement.    It was not necessary to graduate from law school to practice law in Wisconsin in 1914, and Scott, like many of the law students of that era, may have left without graduating.  However, his appearance in the class photograph suggests that his decision must have been a last-minute one.  It is, of course, possible that he failed his final law school exams.

We actually know very little about Scott, either before or after he attended Marquette.  Entries in the 1912 and 1913 Marquette Law School bulletins list him as a resident of Milwaukee, but a search of the 1910 United States Census shows that there were only three Eugene Scotts in Wisconsin that year, and none of the three were black or of an age that would match Scott’s photographs in The Crisis or at the Law School.  However, the 1910 Census does list an African-American named Eugene W. Scott living in Chicago.  That Eugene Scott was born in 1883, and was then working as a waiter in a hotel while living in a boarding house.  If this is the Eugene Scott who enrolled at Marquette in 1911, he would have been 27 or 28 years old at that time.

Scott apparently moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, after leaving Marquette, and in January 15, 1915, he corresponded with Mary Childs Nerney, the secretary of the NAACP, regarding efforts to protest the recently released film Birth of a Nation, which cast African-Americans in a bad light.  Later that year, the Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, published a letter from Scott regarding his efforts to protest the showing of the film in Janesville, which included an appearance before the Janesville City Council.

What happened to Scott after 1915 is not known.  He does not show up in Wisconsin in the 1920 Census, but a Eugene W. Scott does show up as living in Buffalo, New York.  This Eugene Scott was also born in 1883 in Mississippi, as was the Eugene Scott listed as living in Chicago in 1910.  This Eugene Scott was elected president of the Buffalo chapter of the Colored American Workmen’s League in 1919.  Following his election, Scott delivered a eulogy for the recently deceased Theodore Roosevelt, whom Scott described as “the greatest friend of the Negro in American public life since Abraham Lincoln.”

After 1920, the record goes blank.  There is no mention of a Eugene W. Scott born in 1883 in Mississippi in the 1930 United States Census.  More evidence may be forthcoming, but for now Eugene Scott, likely the first black student to enroll in the Marquette Law School, remains a man of mystery.

While Scott may have been the first black student to enroll at the Marquette College of Law, there was at least one black student at the Milwaukee Law School, its predecessor institution.  The career of Horace Scurry will be the subject of the next entry in this series.

When Marquette University acquired the Milwaukee Law School and the Milwaukee University College of Law in the summer of 1908, one of its first tasks was to find a well-known dean for the institution now to be known as the Marquette University College of Law.  Although the new faculty was largely recruited from the ranks of the faculty of the two private law schools that it was to be absorbing, Marquette turned to retired federal judge James Graham Jenkins to be its first dean.  Although he was reportedly reluctant at first to take the position because of his age, Jenkins eventually agreed and served in that post for seven years.

Like many Wisconsin lawyers of his generation, Jenkins was a native New Yorker who had moved to Milwaukee prior to the Civil War.  He was born in Saratoga Springs on July 18, 1834, the son of New York City merchant Edgar Jenkins and Mary Elizabeth (Walworth) Jenkins. His maternal grandfather was Reuben Hyde Walworth, a former United States congressman and New York chancellor who in 1844 was nominated, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to the United States Supreme Court by President John Tyler.

Jenkins did not attend college or law school but instead studied law in the office of the New York City firm of Ellis, Burrill, and Davison for five years. He was admitted to the bar at age 21 and worked as “head clerk” for a New York law office for two years.  In 1857, he relocated to Milwaukee.

Over the next 31 years he engaged in the practice of law in Milwaukee. According to Jenkins, his first position in the city was in the law office of Jason Downer who paid him $3 per week.  However, within in six months he had become a partner with Downer, who in 1864 became a justice on the state Supreme Court.  Jenkins later formed a partnership with Edward Ryan and Matthew Carpenter, both legendary figures in the legal history of Wisconsin, and he was later a partner with the less-well remembered James Hickox.

An active Democrat, Jenkins did not serve in the Civil War.  However, he was one of the speakers at a mass rally on behalf of the Union war effort held in Wisconsin on July 31, 1862, and in 1863, he was elected Milwaukee City Attorney, a position that he would hold until 1867.  After leaving office, he formed his own law firm which was known at various times as Jenkins & Elliott; Jenkins, Winkler, & Smith; and Jenkins, Winkler, Fish & Smith.  In 1877, he chaired the state Democratic convention that nominated James S Mallory of Milwaukee for the state’s highest office.

In 1879, Jenkins himself was the Wisconsin Democratic Party’s nominee for Governor of Wisconsin, but he was beaten fairly soundly by Republican William E. Smith who received over 50% of the votes in a three-man race.  (There was also a Greenback Party candidate who received approximately 7% of the vote.)  In 1881, he was the Democrat candidate for the United States Senate, but the Republican majority in the Wisconsin legislature not surprisingly chose one of their own.

Jenkins’ services to his party did not go unappreciated.  In 1885, newly elected Democratic president Grover Cleveland offered Jenkins a position on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, but Jenkins declined the appointment.  However, on June 18, 1888, he was appointed United States district judge for the eastern district of Wisconsin by President Grover Cleveland and his appointment was confirmed by the Senate on July 2.  Although Cleveland was defeated for reelection in 1888, he was again elected president in 1892.  For his second term, he selected Judge Walter Q. Gresham, a former Republican turned Democrat, as his Secretary of State, and in 1893, Jenkins was appointed Gresham’s replacement as United States Circuit Judge for the Seventh Judicial Circuit.  His nomination was confirmed by the Senate and he sat on the Circuit Court until he retired in 1905 at the age of 71.

Shortly after his appointment to the Seventh Circuit, Jenkins was arrested following an indictment by a Milwaukee grand jury which concluded that he and the other directors of the failed Plankinton Bank had improperly taken money from the bank after it had become insolvent.  The story of Jenkins’ arrest was reported on the first page of the July 13, 1893 New York Times, but Jenkins resisted suggestions that he resign from the bench, and in November, the indictments were declared “null and void” by the Milwaukee Circuit Court.

Jenkins most famous (or infamous) judicial decision also came in 1893 in the case of Farmers Loan & Trust Co. v. No. Pacific Ry., 60 Fed. 803, in which he enjoined a strike against a railroad under receivership and in doing so coined the phrase “government by injunction” (which he viewed favorably).  Jenkins’ injunction, which was interpreted as barring the workers from quitting their jobs, was highly controversial, and there were efforts in Congress to censure him.  Eventually he survived the attacks, although the broader aspects of his ruling were narrowed on appeal.

After retiring from the bench in 1905, Jenkins returned to Milwaukee where he remained at least semi-retired, a status that meant that he was potentially available to fill the newly created position of dean of the Marquette University College of Law.  Although he was 74 years old in the fall of 1908, there were a number of reasons why he was an attractive candidate for the position of dean.  First of all, Jenkins’ prominence as a jurist brought a degree of luster to the law school.  In addition to his status as a federal circuit court judge, he also had been awarded honorary doctor of law degrees from the University of Wisconsin (1893) and Wabash College (1897).  He was also a member of the nine-lawyer committee that drafted the original American Bar Association Canon of Ethics which was formally adopted in the summer of 1908.

Furthermore, although Jenkins himself had not attended law school, he had been involved with legal education off and on throughout his career.  Early in his law practice, he had trained a number of attorneys in his office, including Milwaukee lawyers Horace Upham and Louis Lecher (once Jenkins’ secretary) both studied law under his direction.  While a judge, he had also lectured at law schools in Milwaukee and Chicago.

Although the extent of his involvement is not clear, he reportedly lectured at the Milwaukee Law School during its early years, and he was involved with the establishment of the John Marshall Law School.  John Marshall, an evening law school located in the Chicago Loop, had been founded in 1899, while Jenkins was still on the federal bench and based in Chicago.  He was one of the school’s original faculty members and was the featured speaker at its first commencement in 1902.  Apparently his connection to the law school was one that continued until his retirement from the bench in 1905.  In 1906, the Chicago school published several of his lectures delivered at the law school the year before which was his final year in the Windy City.

While his teaching probably involved little more than showing up a couple of nights a week and delivering lectures on federal court procedure, his experiences did provide him with some exposure to contemporary legal education, albeit of the night school variety.  The Milwaukee Law School and the Milwaukee University Law Schools had provided instruction at night, but the plan for the new Marquette University Law School was to have both a day and an evening program.

Jenkins was also not a Roman Catholic, but that does not appear to have been a major concern of the priests who ran Marquette University in 1908, as all but one of the original law faculty members were Protestants.  (The University took the same ecumenical approach to the recruitment of members for its Board of Regents which was founded in 1909.  The original regents included Jenkins and a number of other Protestants, and, shortly thereafter, Jews.) Although Jenkins was an Episcopalian, he did have a connection to Roman Catholicism in that his uncle, Clarence Walworth, was a convert to Catholicism and a founder of the Paulist Fathers.

One of the strategies of the new Marquette Law School was to supplement the instruction of the regular faculty (all of whom also practiced law) with lecturers drawn from the ranks of distinguished lawyers and jurists.  Presumably, Jenkins’ personal connections in Wisconsin and Illinois helped facilitate this, and the law schools’ first catalog lists 24 such lecturers, including Chicago federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, later the first commissioner of Organized Baseball.  Jenkins himself was listed as a lecturer (and not a professor) with the Law of the Sea and Trade Marks listed as his subject areas.

The law school appeared to flourish under Jenkins direction.  The enrollment in the fall of 1908 was 127 students, including 77 freshmen, totals that far exceeded those of its two private law school predecessors.  Entry level enrollments leveled off after the first year but overall enrollments remained strong, and the number of students reached 166 in the fall of 1915, Jenkins last semester as dean.  Moreover, after initially holding classes in Johnston Hall, the law school obtained its own building in 1910, the Mackie Mansion, located on the current site of Sensenbrenner Hall.  In 1912, the law school was admitted into the Association of American Law Schools, an organization of law schools committed to higher admissions standards (at least a high school diploma or its equivalent) and an expanded curriculum (a three year law course).

Although Jenkins was a “full-time” dean and occupied one of the few faculty offices in the law school building (the Mackie Mansion), he taught very little and appears to have been somewhat detached as an administrator.  He was originally assisted by an associate dean—first Lynn Pease and then Edward Spencer, both former faculty of the Milwaukee Law School—but it appears that neither Jenkins nor the associate deans kept any records at all.  In 1911, Arthur Richter was hired as a full-time faculty member and secretary for the law school, but the situation did not appear to significantly improve.

The final years of Jenkins’ deanship were marked by controversy.  In 1914, Richter published an article in the American Law School Review (the leading publication devoted to legal education in the early 20^th century) that accused the University of Wisconsin Law Department of unfairly lobbying the legislature to defeat a new bar admissions statute that would have eliminated the diploma privilege.  In reply, Professor Howard L. Smith of the University of Wisconsin attacked the character and quality of the Marquette Law School and noted, correctly, that Marquette had supported the diploma privilege until it became clear that the Wisconsin legislature until it became clear that the Wisconsin legislature was not going to extend the privilege to an institution that many Wisconsin lawyers still thought of as a night school.  Marquette, presumably with the approval of Jenkins, then threatened to sue the University of Wisconsin for libel.  This cross-state verbal warfare did little to help the reputation of Marquette and seems not to have harmed its public school neighbor.  It also did not help when it was revealed that during the acrimonious Richter-Smith exchange, Richter was secretly trying to secure an appointment to the Wisconsin faculty.

A more serious problem arose in 1915 when Marquette underwent a surprise inspection by the Association of American Law Schools to determine if it was in fact complying with AALS guidelines.  Although the 81-year old Jenkins decided somewhat abruptly to step down in the fall of 1915, there seems little doubt that his lax leadership and record keeping had made the investigation more likely.  Marquette was able to survive an effort to expel it from the organization the following year, but its poor record keeping clearly hampered its ability to prove its innocence.  Jenkins was replaced as dean by faculty member Max Schoetz, who began as acting dean but was given the permanent position the following year.

After stepping down as dean, Jenkins remained a member of the Marquette Board of Regents until his death in Milwaukee on August 6, 1921.  He also continued to be involved in a variety of civic affairs and sat on a number of boards of charitable organizations.  On September 30, 1917, the Milwaukee Old Settlers Club honored him for his 60 years of residence in the city.  After his retirement, he also published an article on the “Admiralty Jurisdiction of Courts” in Volume 4 of the Marquette Law Review.

Although it was written in 1897 for publication in a highly flattering biographical encyclopedia called Men of Progress: Wisconsin Jenkins would probably have been pleased with the following as his obituary:

He has always been a close student of the law, of general literature and of the arts; and these studies have given him a strength and a grace in all his efforts at the bar which not many of his professional associates have attained. Free from the tricks and cunning which too often disgrace the practice of a noble profession, he came to be recognized as one of the foremost and ablest of the bar of Wisconsin. As a practitioner he had his full share of notable cases in the courts, and conducted as large a percentage of them to successful conclusion as have the most prominent of his contemporaries.

His bust can be found on the first floor of Sensenbrenner Hall, just outside the elevator.