Look to Your Left, Then Look to Your Right: Marquette University Law School, Fall 1919

At all most every law school founded before 1960, a story is told about a past dean who addressed incoming classes by telling them: “Look to your left and then to your right, and three years from now, only one of you will still be here.”  The softer version of the story ended “and only two of you will still be here.”

The story is probably apocryphal in its origins, although it was certainly used by later deans to emphasize the difficulty of legal study.  Today, the story is usually told to illustrate how lax legal education has become in the modern era.

To the extent that that this story reflects past reality, it is actually a commentary on how easy it was to get into most American law schools before the great surge in applications that began around 1970.  Even Harvard Law School did not reject a qualified applicant until 1939 (although it is true that Harvard had stiffer entrance requirements than most law schools in the first half of the twentieth century.)

Most law schools accepted all applicants who met their minimum entry requirements and then let the chips fall.  Those who could handle the work continued to graduation.  Those who couldn’t either flunked out or dropped out.

History does not record whether Dean Max Schoetz delivered the “look to your left” speech when he greeted the entering class at the Marquette Law School in the fall of 1919.  But if it did, and had he used the softer version of the story, his prediction would have been borne out by subsequent events.  There were 92 students enrolled in the first post-World War I day division entering class, and only 66 made it to the second year.  One of those who did not was Milwaukee native Pat O’Brien, who later became famous as a Hollywood actor (e.g., The Front Page, The Knute Rockne Story).

Whether O’Brien and the other 26 students who didn’t continue on for a second year flunked out or merely decided to pursue a different path in life is difficult to determine.  To remain eligible to continue, students had to pass more than half their courses, and 70 constituted a passing grade.

Admission requirements for the law school in 1919 were fairly modest.  Ordinarily a student had to be a high school graduate and have attended college for one year.  However, if an applicant was a high school graduate who had not yet attended college, he or she was allowed to enroll in a four-year program at the law school in which most second-year courses were taken in the college—essentially to meet the one year of college requirement.  This turned out to be a popular alternative, particularly for veterans like O’Brien who were anxious to get on with their careers.  Twenty-nine of the 66 students who entered the day program in the fall of 1919 and continued on for a second year were admitted under this option.  Students who were not high school graduates could opt to take a special examination, and if they passed it they were admitted as well.  Anyone could enroll in the four-year night program whether or not they had finished high school, and 63 individuals did.  The total first year enrollment of 155 in the fall of 1919 was the largest in the school’s history.

Under a recent change necessitated by Association of American Law School guidelines, night students were not eligible to receive a law degree from Marquette beginning with the 1919-1920 academic year, but their attendance did qualify them to take the Wisconsin bar exam.  The diploma privilege had not yet been extended to Marquette, so all its law students were required to pass the bar exam before they could begin law practice.  Wisconsin also required that applicants for admission to the bar have completed a high school course or its equivalent, and a few evening students were attending law school and high school at the same time.

Only four students in the day division and only one in the night group were listed as holding college degrees prior to beginning law school.  Most of the students, day or night, hailed from Wisconsin.  Only 11 of 92 first-year day students are listed in the Law School Bulletin as being from outside Wisconsin, and except for a single student from Montana, the others were all from the Midwest: Illinois (3), Iowa (3), Minnesota (2), and Michigan (2).  Only three of the 92 were female.

Ironically, the night division (known as the “Owls”) was geographically a slightly more diverse group.   Out-of-state students accounted for 13 percent of the night class, just ahead of the 12 percent for the day division.  While there were also students from Minnesota (2), the night class featured individual students from the more distant venues of Ohio, South Dakota, Montana, New Hampshire, Virginia, and the Philippines.  Two of the evening students were female and one, Edward Snyder, was a medical doctor.

Attrition was even higher among the ranks of the night class with only 39 of the 63 night students returning for a second year.  Among those not returning were most of the out-of-state students and Dr. Snyder.

In the aftermath of World War I, which had disrupted the vocational plans of so many American men, the law school appeared to be reluctant to impose barriers in the way of anyone who wanted to become a lawyer.  However, it did not appear to be willing to carry along students who were unable or unwilling to meet its academic standards.  It is worth remembering, however, that law school education was not a prerequisite for bar admission in Wisconsin (and most states) in the early 1920’s.  Those who left law school were free to enter apprenticeship arrangements and qualify for the bar that way.  (In fact, they could still count their unsuccessful law school year or years toward the state’s three- year “law study” requirement.)

The following is the curriculum in effect for first-year day students during the 1919-1920 academic year.  The number in parentheses is the number of hourly meetings each week for that particular course.

FALL

The Study of Cases (1)

Criminal Law (2)

Criminal Procedure (1)

Contracts I (3)

Torts I (2)

Personal Property (2)

Common Law Pleading I (1)

Natural Law (1)

Total Hours:  13

SPRING

Contracts II (3)

Torts II (2)

Common Law Pleading II (2)

Agency (2)

Equity (2)

Real Property I (1)

Natural Law II (1)

Legal Bibliography (1)

Total Hours: 14.

The Natural Law course was taught by the university president, Rev. Herbert Noonan; Personal Property and Legal Bibliography were taught by Dean Schoetz.

Each course had a written examination at the end of the term, which meant that full-time day-division students took 15 exams during their first year of law school, seven in fall and eight in the spring.  Students in the 4-year program — those who lacked prior college credits — took year-long courses in English and Argumentation in lieu of Contracts I & II, Criminal Procedure, Personal Property, Agency, and Equity.

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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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Francis Swietlik, Marquette Law School, and Polish War Relief

Francis X. Sweitlik, Dean of the Marquette College of Law from 1934 to 1953, was a nationally recognized leader of the American Polish community from the early 1930’s until the 1960’s.  During World War II, he was a leading figure in the effort to provide relief for Polish refugees and prisoners of war, and his efforts extended to the provision of general humanitarian aid to the country once the war was over.  Although he initially cooperated with Poland’s post-war Communist government, once it became clear that Poland had become a satellite state of the Soviet Union, he joined the ranks of those who campaigned for the restoration of a non-Communist, democratic government in that country.

Swietlik was born in Milwaukee in 1889 to parents who had recently emigrated from Poland.  He was educated at Marquette where he earned his bachelors, masters, and law degrees.  He began the practice of law in Milwaukee in 1915, and in 1916, he joined the Marquette law faculty on a part-time basis.  He taught at the Law School while practicing law for the next seventeen years (save for the time he was in the military during World War I), and he was named Dean in the fall of 1933 when the previous Dean, Clifton Williams, resigned.

In addition to his career as a lawyer and legal educator, Swietlik was a leading member of the Polish-American community in the United States.  In 1931, he was elected Censor of the Polish National Alliance, the largest Polish fraternal group in the United States.  The Censor was one of the organization’s two highest offices — the President was the other — and was very much a policy-making position.  Swietlik held the position of Censor of the Polish National Alliance for sixteen years, but at the same time held a number of other important positions in the Polish-American community.  In 1934, he was selected as Vice-President of the Polish-American Chamber of Commerce, and that same year he also presided over the American delegation to the International Congress of Poles Abroad, held in Warsaw.  In 1939, he was also chosen as President of the Polish American Council, an organization founded to promote the preservation of Polish culture in the United States.

As a leader of the Polish-American community and the man who was generally recognized as the primary spokesmen for the Chicago Poles (which featured the largest concentration of Polish-Americans of any region of the United States), Swietlik opposed those who insisted that Poles living abroad remained citizens of Poland, which reappeared as an independent country in 1918, after having disappeared from the map of Europe more than a century earlier.

Such Polish nationals believed that expatriate Poles were first and foremost Polish citizen, regardless of where they lived, and as such they owed a duty of loyalty to the current Polish government.  For Swietlik, in contrast, American Poles were Americans first and Poles second, and while he was proud of his Polish heritage (and was fully fluent in Polish), he believed that Poles in the United States owed no special obligations to the relatively new government in Warsaw.

After the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in September 1939, Swietlik became actively involved in the cause of Polish war relief, first as a leader of the Polish National Alliance and then as the director of the Polish National Council which eventually changed its emphasis and name to Polish War Relief.  By one estimate, Swietlik raised almost $17 million dollars in the United States for humanitarian aid to Poles in Europe.

Swietlik was also a prominent defender of the foreign policy of President Franklin Roosevelt.  As a supporter of the President, Swietlik advocated American support for the Polish government in exile in London, but he also endorsed the idea of Polish-Soviet cooperation in the war with Germany.  Not all Polish-Americans agreed with Swietlik on the latter question.  Although the government in exile also embraced the idea of cooperation with the Soviet Union, a growing number of American Poles found it troubling that the United States was not only allied with a country that had invaded Poland (the U.S.S.R.) but was also unwilling to pressure it to agree to reestablish the pre-1939 border between the two countries.

As the scope of atrocities committed against Poland by the Soviet Union became known in 1944 and 1945, and as it became clear that the U.S.S.R. was not going to return to Poland any of the territory that it had seized in 1939, many American Poles broke with the President.  Swietlik, however, remained loyal to Roosevelt.  He supported FDR’s decision to run for an unprecedented third term in 1940, and he campaigned extensively for him inside the Polish community.  Swietlik also consulted personally with the President on Polish issues both before and after the 1940 election (which was, of course, won by Roosevelt).

By 1943, it was becoming apparent that Swietlik’s loyalty to Roosevelt and his polices were hurting his popularity among his fellow Polish-Americans, many of whom were increasingly hostile to what they viewed as FDR’s pro-Soviet Polish policy.  When the Polish American Congress was formed in the fall of 1944 with an agenda that was clearly hostile to the Soviet Union, Swietlik was conspicuously ignored by its founders even though he had been one of the best known Polish-Americans in the country for the past several years (and even though he was present at the organizational meeting).

Although his political influence waned after 1944, Swietlik remained committed to raising money for relief of Poland.  He travelled to Europe after V-E Day to survey the situation, and from 1945 to 1949 (when the Communist government of Poland announced that it would not accept any more humanitarian aid from the West) American Relief for Poland under his direction raised at least $3 million in aid.   Remarkably, he accomplished all of this without ever taking a leave of absence from his duties at the Law School, which usually involved teaching a full load of courses.

In the aftermath of the war he received numerous citations for his efforts on behalf of the Polish population.  He was honored by the governments of Poland, France, and Portugal (where American Relief for Poland had staged his rescue efforts after 1941), and in 1952, he was named a Knight of the Roman Catholic Order of St. Gregory by Pope Pius XII.  He was also involved with the resettlement of 120,000 postwar Polish refugees into the United States, which had been made possible by an act of Congress in 1948.  Although the organization was largely inactive after 1949, Swietlik remained president of American Relief for Poland into the late 1960’s.

In the postwar era, he also adopted a much more critical position on the Soviet Union and eventually denounced the policies of the Roosevelt administration that he had earlier supported.  He remained Dean at Marquette Law School until 1953 when he was elected to the Circuit Court of Milwaukee County.  He continued to teach at the Law School, even after his retirement from the bench at age 70 in 1959.  He died in Milwaukee in 1983.

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