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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From Marquette Law School to the National Football League, Part II: Larry McGinnis

Laurence J. McGinnis, usually known as “Larry” or “Mac,” was a football teammate and fellow Marquette law student of both Lavvy Dilweg and Biff Taugher.  And like both of them, he spent time after law school playing in the National Football League.

McGinnis was born on July 16, 1899, in Topeka, Kansas.  He starred in football at Topeka’s Hayden High, and after a stint in the United States military during World War I, he enrolled at Washburn University in his hometown.  He played varsity football at Washburn, but in the fall of 1921, he relocated to Milwaukee where he enrolled in the Marquette Law School.  At the time of his arrival in Milwaukee, he was 22 years old.

In 1921, Marquette required law students to have completed one year of college training, but the law school also operated a four-year program that combined law and undergraduate courses for those students who wanted to begin law school without any prior college training.  McGinnis enrolled in the four-year program, even though he had apparently attended Washburn for two years.

Like Biff Taugher, McGinnis entered Marquette in an era when it was not unusual for law students to play on university athletic teams, so long as they had not exhausted their eligibility playing elsewhere. In 1921 and 1922, the 6’1″, 210-pound McGinnis starred for Marquette as an offensive and defensive lineman who also handled the kick-off chores.

A broken nose forced McGinnis out of the line-up for several games in 1921, but he returned to anchor the Marquette line in the next to last game of the season, the previously mentioned contest with Notre Dame.  Although Notre Dame prevailed, 21-7, McGinnis won praise as he, in the words of the Marquette Hilltop, “repeatedly stopped the onslaught of the great scoring machine which Knute Rockne had developed.”  The 1921 team finished the season with a record of 6-2-1, with the only other loss being a 3-0 defeat by Creighton.

In 1922, McGinnis, in his final year of college eligibility, was chosen as the captain of the Marquette team.  Under his leadership, the Marquette eleven (which now included Lavvie Dilweg) put together one of the greatest seasons in the school’s history, going 8-0-1, and outscoring its opponents 213-3.  (These opponents  included Creighton but not Notre Dame.)  The only two “blemishes” on its record were a 0-0 tie with Ripon in the second game of the season and a field goal surrendered to the University of Detroit in a hard-fought 6-3 victory for Marquette.

When McGinnis left the field near the end of the final game of the 1922 season, a 38-0 drubbing of South Dakota State, it was reported that “a mighty cheer arose and the students and fans stood.”

Although McGinnis was not eligible to play for Marquette in 1923, he remained enrolled in the law school for two more years.  He also shifted his extracurricular activities to college theatrics and the school’s Kansas Club.  He joined the theatrical Harlequin Club and during his senior year played one of the lead roles in a student-written production, “Chinese Money,” which was apparently an effort at musical comedy.

The Marquette Kansas Club was a social organization made up of students with ties to the Jayhawk state.  The organization’s mission was to “spread the fame of Marquette throughout the South,” and especially in Kansas and Oklahoma. During the 1924-25 academic year McGinnis chaired the Kansas Club, which counted a total of 21 members.  McGinnis had also served as chairman of the 1922 Law Dance, the major event of the Law School social season.

Although McGinnis was an outstanding football player, his absence from the gridiron was hardly fatal in 1923, as the renamed Marquette Golden Avalanche was undefeated and untied in eight games, with victories over national powers Boston College and the University of Detroit, as well as over pesky Ripon College.  Even without McGinnis, the team contained a substantial law school presence as the roster included at least five law students: Charles Regan (end), Earl Kennedy (center), Joseph Bennett (halfback), Irving Meheigan (guard), and Lavvy Dilweg (end), with Regan, Kennedy, and Dilweg serving as starters, and Kennedy acting as team captain for part of the season.

Moreover, the end of McGinnis’ playing career at Marquette did not spell the end of his football career in Milwaukee.  During the 1923 season, he signed with the local professional team, the Milwaukee Badgers who had entered the NFL the previous year.  This enabled him to both go to class at the law school and to practice with the team during the week and then travel with the Badgers to their games on the weekend (when they were not in Milwaukee.)

On a team that finished 7-2-3, and tied for third (with the Packers) in a 21-team NFL, McGinnis played an important role as a back-up lineman.   Playing center, guard, and end, he appeared in seven of the team’s 12 games.  In three of these games he was in the starting line-up when injuries made the regular starter unavailable.   He was also the only former Marquette player on the Badgers.

The following year, 1924, he started 12 of the team’s 13 games at either guard or center.   Unfortunately, the team’s record declined to a mediocre 5-8-0, as the team fell out of contention for the league championship.  On November 9, the team was still 4-3-0 with an outside chance of being again among the league’s leaders, but over the next 21 days, the team dropped five of six games.  In 1924, McGinnis was joined on the Badger roster by his former Marquette teammate, quarterback Red Dunn (who attended the college, but not the law school).

The 1924 season proved to be the end point of McGinnis’ football career.  McGinnis graduated from the law school in the spring of 1925, and on the following September 27, he married Ruth Zwickey of Iola, Wisconsin.  Zwickey and McGinnis had met as fellow students at Marquette where Ruth was a nursing student.  The McGinnis-Zwickey wedding occurred exactly one week before the 1925 season opener for the Milwaukee Badgers, but at that point it was clear that McGinnis had decided to abandon football for a career in law.

Instead of donning the pads and moleskin that fall in Milwaukee, he opened his own law office in the town of Amery, which was located in Polk County in northwestern Wisconsin.   A year after beginning his practice, McGinnis was appointed to the county bench, and in 1930, he was elected Polk County State’s Attorney, a position that he held for six years.  He voluntarily returned to private practice in Amery in 1936, and for the next twelve years he practiced law and served in a variety of roles in community activities.  He was president of the Amery Community Club and chairman of the Red Cross fund, and was an active member of the American Legion and the Knights of Columbus.

McGinnis died unexpectedly of a heart attack on March 21, 1948, in Amery, several months shy of his 49th birthday.  His wife lived until 1982.  The couple had no children.

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From Marquette Law School to the National Football League Part I: Claude Taugher

The opening of a new NFL season provides an opportunity for the Marquette family to remember that there was a time when Marquette University was a regular supplier of players to the National Football League.  In the early 1920s, this could be said about the Marquette Law School as well as Marquette College.

An earlier post described the career of Lavern “Lavvy” Dilweg, L ’27, who, after an All-American career at Marquette, played for the Milwaukee Badgers and Green Bay Packers in the National Football League.  After his playing career ended, Dilweg became a prominent lawyer in Green Bay and also served as a United States Congressman during the Second World War.

In addition to Dilweg, at least two other former Marquette law students—Claude “Biff” Taugher and Laurence “Mac” McGinnis—played in the NFL in the 1920s.  To this list could also be added the name of Paul Robeson, who studied informally at the law school while playing for the Milwaukee Badgers in 1922.

This article deals with the career of “Biff” Taugher, a war hero turned law student who played fullback for the Green Bay Packers during the 1922 season.  A second post will deal with Taugher’s teammate, law school classmate, and fellow NFL alumnus, Laurence McGinnis.

Claude Buckley Taugher was born in 1895, in Marathon County, Wisconsin, the son of country doctor P.J. Taugher and Mary Buckley Taugher. Taugher attended high school in Wausau, and at age 21 enrolled at Carroll College in Waukesha, where he played varsity football.

In 1917, Taugher’s college career was interrupted by the United States’ entry in World War I.  That year, he left Carroll College for the United States Marines, in which he was commissioned a second lieutenant.

Fighting in France in November 1918, as a member of the 6th Regiment of the Marine Corps’ 2nd Division, Taugher’s platoon successfully stormed the French village of Bayonville, capturing 61 German soldiers in the process.  Although wounded in the battle, Taugher refused to leave his troops.  For his “extraordinary heroism in action,” he was subsequently awarded both the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross.  Nine days after the incident at Bayonville, the Armistice was signed, and Taugher was discharged from the Marines as a first lieutenant on August 15, 1919.

Returning to Wisconsin, Taugher enrolled at Marquette for the fall 1919 semester and immediately became part of the football team. Initially enrolling in the college, he entered the law school the following fall (1920) as a full-time day student.

Marquette was a regional power in college football in the late 1910s and 1920s, and during Taugher’s three years on the team, the Hilltoppers compiled records of 6-2-1, 6-1-0, and 6-2-1.  Taugher’s first season with the team included both 20-0 and 31-0 trouncings of his former school, Carroll College, and a disappointing 13-0 loss to the University of Wisconsin.  (The Marquette-UW “series” ended after the 1919 season and did not resume until 1932.)

Clearly, the most highly publicized game of Taugher’s career at Marquette was the November 19, 1921 match in Milwaukee between Marquette and Knute Rockne’s Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  In the post-World War I era, Notre Dame was universally recognized as the strongest team in college football—it went undefeated in 1919 and 1920, and from 1919 to 1924, it compiled an overall record of 55-4-0.

Undeterred, Marquette jumped out to an early 7-0 lead on a 4th down touchdown by Taugher that followed a blocked punt.  Notre Dame scored to tie the game in the second period, but the game, described by the New York Times as “slowed considerably by a wet and muddy field,” remained deadlocked until the final period when the Marquette defense finally succumbed, allowing Notre Dame to hobble away with a 21-7 victory.

The Hilltoppers rebounded the following week with a 7-0 victory over Wabash in the season finale.  Not counting the Notre Dame game, Marquette outscored its 1921 opponents by a total of 130 points to 8, while keeping all eight opponents from scoring a touchdown.   (The 8 points came on two field goals and a safety.)  Besides the Notre Dame loss, the only two “blemishes” on the team’s record were a 3-0 loss to Creighton and a 0-0 tie with Ripon.

His college eligibility exhausted, Taugher appears to have either withdrawn or been dismissed from the law school after the fall semester of 1921.  In September 1922, he signed a contract with the Green Bay Packers, but only after assuring Packer player-coach Curly Lambeau that he had no remaining college eligibility.

Under the NFL’s own rules, teams were not permitted to sign players who still retained college eligibility.  The Packers had been expelled from the NFL in January of 1922 because of the team’s use of still-eligible college players the previous season, and while they were subsequently reinstated with new ownership, Lambeau was particularly concerned that the team sign no more ineligible players.

At the time of his signing, which predated the NFL draft by more than a decade, Taugher was already well known to the Packers, and not just because of his success at Marquette.  In 1920, following the conclusion of the Marquette season, Taugher had joined a team known as the Milwaukee All-Stars which scheduled a game against the Packers, then an independent professional team.  (Green Bay would join the NFL, still known as the Professional Football Association of America, the following year.)  Taugher had starred in the game, and two years later, his exploits in that game were still clearly remembered in Green Bay.

At the time he signed with the Packers, Taugher was 27 years old, and weighed in at 5’10” tall and 185 pounds.  He would be one of seven former Marquette football players who would appear in games for the Packers during the 1922 season.

Unfortunately, Taugher’s stint with the Packers proved to be quite brief.  Early in the season, he lost the battle for the starting fullback position to a 29-year-old rookie from Penn State named Stan Mills. As a Packer, Taugher played in only two games, one of which he started, and according to the Neft and Cohen Encyclopedia of Professional Football, in those two games he carried the ball only four times for a total of two yards.  However, one of his carries did result in a touchdown.

With a roster limited by league rules to 18 players, the Packers apparently concluded that they did not have a spot for Taugher, and the 27-year-old fullback was cut loose.  After starting the season 0-3-0, the Taugher-less Packers rebounded by winning four games and tying three in their final seven games.

Relatively little is known about the details of Taugher’s life after his departure from the Packers, but it appears that there were many bumps in the road in a life marked by deception, petty crime, and alcohol.  In the summer of 1923, Taugher was appointed head football coach of Mount St. Charles College in Helena, Montana, and his impending arrival was celebrated by the Helena newspaper.  Coincidentally, the Montana team, like Marquette in Taugher’s time, was nicknamed the “Hilltoppers.”  However, a story in the Helena paper reported that in addition to being a football star, Taugher was also a graduate of Carroll College and the Marquette Law School.  Neither assertion was correct, and one guesses that Taugher was the source of the misinformation.

However, by the time the 1923 season began Taugher was no longer the coach at the Montana school, and instead was engaged as head coach at his undergraduate alma mater, Carroll College of Waukesha, Wisconsin.  Whether Taugher resigned the Montana position when the Carroll opening appeared or whether he was fired by his new employer is not known.  (Somewhat ironically, Mount St. Charles College changed its name to Carroll College in 1932, and, still sporting that name, is today a leading small college football power.)

Alas, Taugher was no more successful as a college coach than he was as an NFL fullback.  Carroll went winless in 1923, and after the end of the season, Taugher’s contract was not renewed.

Taugher appears to have led something of a vagabond existence, dividing his post-football life between the Fox Valley, Milwaukee, and Washington, D.C.  He married Marguerite Heney in Green Bay in 1926, and the couple had four children, three of whom survived to adulthood.  Although Taugher lived in different places in the 1930s and 1940s, his daughters all appear to have graduated from high school in Green Bay.

While his stay with the Packers had been brief, he was apparently recognized as a member of the Packer family, and in 1928, he participated in one of the first Packer homecoming games in Green Bay, although reports of his appearance mistakenly referred to him as a prominent physician in Milwaukee.  In 1930, he was appointed to the position of Probation Officer in Milwaukee, but in 1935, he was convicted of the offense of drunk in public in Washington, D.C.  A similarly embarrassing incident occurred in 1943, when he resided in Appleton.

Taugher died on February 8, 1963, and was buried Milwaukee’s Wood National Cemetery.

Years after his death, Claude Taugher also appeared as a character in Clarence J. Rockey’s 2006 novel, The Tin Tie, which is a fictional account of a young German soldier from World War I who emigrates to Milwaukee and enrolls at Marquette.  The protagonist joins the Marquette football team where one of his teammates is Claude Taugher.  Taugher graciously befriends the young “Kraut,” even though he quickly learns that he and his new teammate had only a year earlier been trying to kill each other on the battlefields of Europe.

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