As the Law School community prepares to leave our current home and move into a new facility, it seems appropriate to pause and recall some of the memorable events that have taken place in Sensenbrenner Hall over the years.  Professor Michael McChrystal shares the third of what we hope will be many recollections of classroom surprises, distinguished visitors, and construction oddities associated with our present surroundings.  These memories will ensure that Sensenbrenner Hall lives on forever in our hearts. 

 For many years, the Wall of Judges, on the first floor hallway in old Sensenbrenner, included photographs of alums who were county or circuit court judges in the state.  The wall was filled with photos, which were probably six by eight inches in size, if I recall correctly.  There was a statistic floating around that one in every twenty graduates was a judge, although I have no sense of the accuracy of that count, nor even of how “judge” would be defined for that purpose.

I first walked into Sensenbrenner Hall on August 1^st, 1966.  I was a newly appointed Associate Professor and the Director of the MU Law School Institute on Poverty and the Law.  The federal Office of Economic Opportunity had smiled on the MU Law School with a grant to the tune of about $250,000. 

Alas, even then our beloved Sensenbrenner Hall lacked sufficient office space, and the Institute on Poverty was outposted to rooms on the third floor of the Varsity Theater Building (a couple of blocks west on Wisconsin Avenue).

However, I was not completely cut off from the rest of the faculty.  Dean Robert Boden, who had hired me out of Texas Southern University Law School, urged me to meet with the faculty at its daily 10 a.m. coffee hour in a tiny room in the basement of Sensenbrenner Hall.  There, four or five out of the seven-member law faculty would opine on the latest fortunes of the MU Basketball Warriors or the Green Bay Packers (depending on the season).

As the Law School community prepares to leave our current home and move into a new facility, it seems appropriate to pause and recall some of the memorable events that have taken place in Sensenbrenner Hall over the years.  Professor Jack Kircher shares the first of what we hope will be many faculty memories recounting the various classroom surprises, distinguished visitors, and construction oddities associated with our present surroundings.  These memories will ensure that Sensenbrenner Hall lives on forever in our hearts.  

My first memory of Sensenbrenner Hall goes back to my time as a 1L.  At that time, the library occupied all of the third floor, the second floor had two large classrooms and a moot court room, the first floor had two large classrooms, and the administrative offices (Dean, etc.) occupied the space now used by Admissions.  During the 2d semester of my first year, we were in our Contracts class during the early afternoon in a second floor classroom that occupied all of the east side of that floor (now Rooms 204 and 210). It must have been Springtime, as I remember that the windows in the room were open (they opened back then).  Unbeknownst to us, Marquette University had just announced that the school would no longer play varsity football beginning the following fall.  As we sat there in class, discussing some arcane Contracts issue, we slowly began to hear the chant “we want football” coming from the west.