Why the Law Degree Is Called a J.D. and Not an LL.B.

Professor Greipp’s fascinating post on Lois Kuenzli Collins, an early female graduate of Marquette Law School, made reference to Ms. Collins’ law degree being upgraded to a J.D. in the late 1960s. That was actually a fairly common occurrence at that time, as thousands of American lawyers in the 1960s found themselves the possessors of a newly styled doctoral law degree. Between 1964 and 1969, at the encouraging of the American Bar Association, most American law schools (including Marquette) upgraded their basic law degree from the traditional “LL.B.” to “J.D.,” to reflect the by then almost universal postgraduate status of the degree. For good measure, most also made the change retroactive, subject to the graduate returning his or her old degree for a new one.

An American Bar Association committee had recommended that the law degree be called the juris doctor as early as 1906, and a small number of law schools, most notably the University of Chicago, had long called the basic law degree the J.D. However, until the late 1960s the vast majority of schools used the designation of LL.B. or B.L. which suggested that the law degree was an undergraduate degree (as it still is in most places in the world).

What is much less well known is that in an earlier era, some law schools simultaneously offered both the LL.B. and J.D. degrees. While the original law degree awarded by Marquette was the LL.B., between 1926 and 1943, Marquette offered its students the option of earning either an LL.B. degree or a J.D. degree. This innovation apparently originated with Dean Max Schoetz, but was continued after his untimely death in 1927.

Both of the two law degrees were normally earned in three years. However, to earn the J.D., a student had to (1) have already earned an undergraduate degree in a field other than law–admission to Marquette required only two years of college between 1926 and 1934 and only three after that year—(2) compile an average grade of 88 (out of 100) in all law courses (compared to 77 for LL.B. candidates); and (3) prepare an acceptable thesis on a law-related topic in his (or her) third year. (The student was also required to assign the copyright in the thesis to the law school dean.)

There was no formal advantage to the J.D. degree, at least in regard to bar admission. One did not need to have a law degree of any sort to take the Wisconsin bar examination until 1940—three years of study in or outside of a law school was all that was required. Moreover, after 1933, either degree qualified its holder for automatic admission to the Wisconsin bar under the diploma privilege, which was extended to Marquette that year. The University of Wisconsin, which had had the diploma privilege since 1870, had never awarded a J.D. degree, so there was no basis on which to distinguish between the two degrees. There was also no evidence that law firms placed any special premium on hiring graduates with the J.D. degree.

Given this lack of immediate advantage, few Marquette students appear to have even attempted the J.D. degree. In any given year, only a handful of students met the full set of qualifications, and less than 40 such degrees were awarded in the decade and a half that the option existed. The last of the original J.D.’s at Marquette were awarded in 1939, although the option remained on the books until 1943 (or perhaps a year or two longer as records for the law school for 1944 and 1945 are almost non-existent).

Our colleague Jim Ghiardi, who attended Marquette Law School from 1939 to 1942, recalls that the J.D. degree fell out of favor as students began to realize that the extra work necessary to earn the degree provided them with no real additional benefit, particularly during a Great Depression with a world war looming on the horizon.

Lois Kuenzli Collins was enrolled at the law school when the J.D. option was created, and like most of her classmates she did not qualify for the “higher” degree. However, her recollection of the distinction between the two degrees probably explains her excitement forty years later when her degree was “upgraded” from an LL.B. to a J.D.

As it turns out, there was nothing unique about Marquette’s awarding both J.D. and LL.B. degrees in the 1920s and 1930s. The practice was particularly widespread, it appears, in the Midwest.

As late as 1961, there were still 15 ABA-accredited law schools in the United States which awarded both LL.B. and J.D. degrees. The fifteen included George Washington University, Chicago-Kent, DePaul, John Marshall, Loyola of Chicago, Northwestern, Indiana, Drake, Iowa, Washburn, Michigan, Detroit College of Law, Wayne State, Ohio State, and Willamette. At least by a broad definition, all of the 15 were located in the Midwest except for George Washington (D.C.) and Willamette (Ore.).

In all of the listed schools except Northwestern and Iowa, the largest number of graduates received the LL.B. degree. (At Northwestern and Iowa, the J.D. degree was the more commonly awarded.) The practice was not exactly dying out either, as the following year both the University of North Dakota and the University of Oregon joined the list of schools awarding both degrees. Duke adopted the J.D./LL.B. distinction after 1961, and the two options were listed in the Duke Law School catalog as late as 2007, although the school apparently had not awarded an LL.B. degree since the 1960s.

As the number of law students who entered law schools with college degrees increased in the 1950s and 1960s, a number of institutions apparently used the J.D./LL.B. distinction to encourage would-be law students to complete their undergraduate degrees before beginning their legal studies. (If they failed to do so, they got the bachelor’s degree, not the doctorate.)

Presumably, the practice of awarding two different degrees was originally related to the argument that it did not make sense to award a second bachelor’s degree to someone who already had one. (A previous undergraduate degree appears to have always been a prerequisite for the pre-1960s J.D.) Unfortunately, there does not appear to be an easily accessible source that identifies when individual schools began to award the two law degrees. The practice started at Marquette in 1926 and at Chicago-Kent in 1933, but it could well predate the 1920s at other schools.

The concentration of the “two types of law degree” schools in the Midwest (and particularly in Chicago) seems likely related to the presence of the highly prestigious University of Chicago which from its founding always required its students to have college degrees, and, beginning in 1902, it always awarded it graduates the J.D. degree.

In contrast, Harvard Law School, which was the first law school to insist on a prior undergraduate degree as a prerequisite for admission, considered the possibility of awarding some sort of doctorate in law in the early 1900s but decided to stay with the LL.B. Harvard also invested heavily in the early 20th century in graduate law programs that resulted in the award of LL.M. and S.J.D. degrees. Given that this graduate degree terminology did not really fit if the first law degree was called a doctorate, Harvard retained the undergraduate designation for its law degree. Given its great prestige, whatever was done at Harvard Law School was likely to imitated at law schools across the country.

It is not clear why a few schools like Marquette and the University of Washington once awarded both LL.B. and J.D. degrees but decided to stop doing so long before the 1960s. Washington eliminated the J.D. degree in 1938 and, as mentioned above, Marquette followed in the mid-1940s. The Marquette experience suggests that the decision may have been related to a lack of student interest in the more demanding degree, as well as to a general revamping of the law school that occurred immediately after World War II under the leadership of Dean Francis Swietlik.

There were a few other variations on the J.D. degree as well. At Georgetown in the 1930s, one could earn a J.D. degree, but only after earning an LL.B. degree, which made it more in the nature of an LL.M. or an S.J.D. degree. Another variation occurred at William & Mary where, for much of the 20th century, graduates received a B.C.L. degree rather than either the LL.B. or the J.D.

By the end of the 1960s, the variations in terminology had been eliminated and the letters “JD” are now synonymous with the words “law degree”. However, we live in a time when many of the assumptions of contemporary legal education are being reexamined, and the legitimacy of much of what has been long taken for granted is being reconsidered.

Perhaps one result of the current anxiety will be a movement away from the one-size-fits-all J.D. degree of the late 1960s to something more akin to the multiple-degree model embraced by Marquette in the 1920s and 1930s.

 

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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.)

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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.

 

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