Celebrating March 22, 1877: Women First Allowed Bar Admission in Wisconsin

On March 22, 1877, the Wisconsin legislature passed a bill that prohibited denying a person admission to the state bar on the basis of sex.  The bill was in no small part due to the efforts of Lavinia Goodell, the first woman admitted to the state bar in Wisconsin.

Goodell was born in New York in 1839 and moved to Janesville in 1871 when she was 32 years old.  Goodell was interested in the law, but no law firm would take her on as an apprentice, which was a common path to becoming a lawyer in the 19th century.  So she studied law on her own.  Her dedication to law apparently won over Pliny Norcross, a partner in the Janesville firm of Norcross and Jackson and eventually Goodell worked there before striking out on her own.  Norcross was instrumental in helping Goodell gain admission to the Rock County bar in 1874.  Goodell initially did collections work, but then began to make a successful career out of doing work for women’s temperance groups.

It wasn’t until Goodell needed to appeal a case to the Wisconsin Supreme Court that her gender became an issue.  According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, at that time it was customary for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to allow any lawyer admitted to any circuit court bar to practice before it.  Not so for Lavinia Goodell.

In 1876, Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously and unequivocally denied her motion to appear before that court. (In re Goodell, 39 Wis. 232 (1876)).

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United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Unlikely to Be the Court’s Most Senior Member

Wisconsin, like a number of states, designates the senior member of its state supreme court in terms of service as the Chief Justice.  The United States Supreme Court, in contrast, uses a system in which the President of the United States chooses a new Chief Justice every time the existing Chief dies or steps down.

Although the new Chief Justice can be chosen from the ranks of sitting justices, thirteen of the sixteen Chief Justices in U.S. history were appointed to the position from outside the court (although one, Charles Evans Hughes, was a former Associate Justice).  The Associate Justices elevated to the head of the Supreme Court were Justices Edward White (1910), Harlan Fiske Stone (1941), and Wisconsin’s own, William Rehnquist (1986).

One of the consequences of this system of appointment is that it has been quite rare in American history for the Chief Justice also to be the senior justice in terms of service on the court.  Ordinarily the senior justice is not the Chief Justice, but the justice who sits on the Chief Justice’s immediate right.

Only four times in the Court’s 200+ year history has the Chief Justice also been its most senior member.

The first occasion came following the death of Justice Bushrod Washington in 1829.  With Washington’s death, his Federalist colleague Chief Justice John Marshall became the Court’s senior member and continued to be until his death in 1835.

The other three Chief Justices to achieve “senior-most justice” status, were, not surprisingly, the three Chief Justices appointed from the ranks of the Associate Justices.

Following the death of John Marshall Harlan the elder in October of 1911, Chief Justice Edward White, who had only been Chief Justice for 10 months, but who had served on the Court since 1894, became the senior member and remained so until his death in May 1921.  Harlan Fiske Stone (appointed in 1925) was already the senior member of the Court when he was appointed Chief Justice in 1941, a position he held until his death in 1945.  (Stone’s seniority may have been the reason why President Franklin Roosevelt chose the liberal Republican over numerous Democratic contenders for the honor.)

The most recent Chief Justice to achieve senior justice status was William Rehnquist.  Following the retirements of Associate Justices Byron “Whizzer” White and Harry Blackmun in 1993 and 1994, respectively, Rehnquist (appointed 1973) became the Court’s longest-serving member.   He also served longer in that dual capacity, from August 3, 1994 (the day of Blackmun’s retirement), to September 3, 2005 (Rehnquist’s death), a period of 11 years and one month.

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Does the Legislature Lack the Power to Revise the Redistricting Law?

Republican lawmakers have asserted that they have no power to re-draw the election maps at issue in the ongoing Baldus v. Brennan litigation in federal court, despite a suggestion from the three judge panel hearing the case that the legislature make revisions to the law. The 1954 Wisconsin Supreme Court opinion that these lawmakers cite for this proposition does not decide the issue, and the unique factual situation of that case does not correspond to the present situation. In a familiar pattern, it appears that the fierce litigation between state Republicans and Democrats threatens to pull the courts deep into uncharted waters.

The Wisconsin Constitution provides:

“At its first session after each enumeration made by the authority of the United States, the legislature shall apportion and district anew the members of the Senate and Assembly, according to the number of inhabitants.”

(Article IV, Section 3).

In plain English, the legislature must pass a redistricting bill in the first legislative session after the federal census. Once it does so, the general rule is that a valid apportionment law may not be replaced with a law creating new districts until the time of the next census. Of course, if the legislature’s redistricting legislation violates the state or federal constitutions, it is not valid and the legislature must pass a new apportionment bill. The three judge panel in the Baldus case may rule the maps invalid, but it suggested that the legislature might consider passing a new redistricting plan rather than proceed to trial.

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