The Law School Welcomes Visiting Professor Mary Beth Beazley

This semester, the law school is hosting another highly-esteemed  professor as a Robert E. Boden Visiting Professor of Law:  Mary Beth Beazley.  Professor Beazley is Associate Professor of Law and Director of Legal Writing at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.  She has taught at Ohio State for more than 20 years, and taught at Vermont Law School and the University of Toledo before that.

Professor Beazley is the author of numerous articles related to legal writing, and one of the most widely-used textbooks in law school Appellate Advocacy courses (including our own):  A Practical Guide to Appellate Advocacy . She served as the Legal Writing Institute’s President from 1998 until 2000; served as editor-in-chief (and member of the board of editors) for Legal Writing:  The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute. She is also the immediate past president of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD).

In 2006, Professor Beazley’s excellence in teaching, writing, and service earned her the prestigious Thomas F. Blackwell award, given each year by the Legal Writing Institute and ALWD, to recognize a person who has demonstrated  “an ability to create and integrate new ideas for teaching and motivating legal writing educators and students.” Furthermore, in 2008 she received the Burton Award for Outstanding Contributions to Legal Writing Education.

In short, she is one of the most-accomplished and well-regarded professors in the legal writing field.  It is a privilege to have her teaching here in our program for a semester.

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An apostrophic dilemma

A punctuation debate made the National Law Journal this week.  The current Supreme Court reporter of decisions, Frank Wagner, is retiring at the end of this month.  His NLJ interview included the following discussion of differences of opinion among Supreme Court Justices regarding the use of apostrophes with plural possessives.

I wouldn’t call it a “disagreement,” just a difference in preferences. And I doubt it needs to be resolved, at least at the present. When I came to the Court in 1987, the prevailing rule for a regular plural possessive was simply to add an apostrophe after the word’s final “s.” For example, “Congress’.” Over the years, however, four justices informed my office they preferred to add another “s” following the word’s final s-apostrophe — e.g., “Congress’s” — albeit each in slightly differing circumstances. The justices are all highly capable legal writers committed to maintaining their own individual writing styles. Thus, while we try to maintain a high degree of consistency as to style in the U.S. Reports, the Reporter’s Office has always kept a list, and has attempted to assure the incorporation, of each justice’s individual style preferences in his or her opinions. I have monitored the plural-possessives situation over the years, but because a majority of the Court has always continued to follow the original prevailing rule — which I prefer — I have never felt the need to poll the Court to try to achieve common ground. There seems even less reason to do so now, since only three of the four dissenters from the prevailing view are still on the Court.

As Legal Writing Prof blog points out, this interview should demonstrate to students that they must be prepared for grammar and punctuation sticklers at all levels.

My own view on this particular punctuation dilemma is that if you know the alternatives well enough to debate them intelligently, whichever one you prefer is fine by me.  You will usually be correct by paying attention to whether you pronounce an additional -s sound, or not, at the end of the word.

(Note: It is somewhat confusing that the example Wagner gives regarding a “plural possessive” was written as a singular possessive.  I.e., “Congresses” (not Congress) is the plural of Congress.)

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Professor Willis Lang and the Teaching of Legal Research

In recent years, Marquette has won numerous kudos for its program in legal research and writing.  Although the current version of the program is still relatively new, the teaching of legal research and writing at Marquette has its roots in the 1920’s.

In summing up the accomplishments of the Law School during the 1923-1924 academic year—the last in the old Mackie Mansion—the Hilltop (the university yearbook) noted:  “Prof. Willis E. Lang introduced a new course of Legal Research for the students.  It proved a most valuable subject as it teaches where and how to find the law.”

For a number of years prior to 1923, all Marquette Law students had been required to participate in the practice court program, which required them to draft pleadings and legal documents and do a certain amount of legal research.  The Law School also required a one-credit course in Legal Bibliography that focused primarily on the use of proper legal citation in brief writing.  However, Lang’s Legal Research course was apparently the school’s first attempt at systematic instruction in the mechanics of legal research and the entire canon of library resources.

Willis Lang (pictured above in 1949 or 1950) was a fixture of the Marquette Law School for many years.  Born in Waushara County, Wisconsin in 1892, he earned both his bachelor of letters degree and his law degree from Marquette in 1916.  Although it was fairly common in the early 1900’s for Marquette students to earn both the Bachelor of Science degree and the M.D. degree at the same commencement, Lang appears to be the only person to have simultaneously received a law degree and any type of bachelor’s degree.

Lang  passed the bar in the summer following his graduation and then remained in Milwaukee to practice law.  From October 1916 until September 1921, he was in active practice, most of the time while affiliated with William L. Tibbs, special counsel for Milwaukee County.  He was also a notary.

Lang joined the Marquette law faculty as a full-time faculty member in the fall of 1921, when Marquette decided to add a fourth full-time member to the faculty.  In addition to teaching Corporations, Partnerships, Insurance, Agency, Personal Property, Wills and Administration, and Legal Bibliography, he also taught commercial law in what was then called the School of Economics (i.e., the Marquette business school).

The 1921 appointment of Lang to the law faculty gave him the distinction of being the first graduate of the Marquette Law School to hold a full-time teaching position at the school.  Previous full-time professors and deans had received law degrees from the University of Wisconsin (Max Schoetz), Harvard (John McDill Fox), and the University of Chicago (Arthur Richter), or else had been admitted to the bar without attending law school (James Jenkins and Augustus Umbreit).

During his tenure at the Law School, Lang taught a wide variety of courses and held a number of advisory and administrative positions.  He served as Law School secretary (a position that no longer exists, but was similar to the modern post of associate dean) from 1923-1951; as Assistant to the Dean from 1928 to 1951; and as Law School Registrar from 1946 to 1951.  He was also the faculty adviser to the Law Review from 1928 to 1941, and he regularly represented Marquette at the annual meetings of the Association of American Law Schools.

During his career, Lang published a number of articles on various aspects of Wisconsin law, and he was a regular reviewer of legal treatises written by others.  Most of his publications appeared in the Marquette Law Review.  He had a longstanding interest in pedagogy, and in the 1930’s, he enrolled as a graduate student in education at Marquette while teaching full-time at the Law School.  He was awarded an M.Ed. degree in 1941, his twentieth year on the faculty.

Lang remained on the faculty until his untimely death at age 58 on April 29, 1951.  His funeral was held in Gesu Church, and all six of his pallbearers were former students who had become judges.  He was survived by his wife and daughter and by his son, Willis Lang, Jr. (1923-1998), who was then a second-year law student and who went on to a long career as a lawyer in southeastern Wisconsin.  His Marquette colleagues at the time of his death included current Prof. Emeritus Jim Gihardi who joined the law faculty in 1946.  As a law student at Marquette from 1939 to 1942, Prof. Gihardi was also one of Lang’s students.

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