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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A Jewel in Our Midst

Throughout the history of legal education, there has been a consistent call for greater levels of experiential learning and especially clinical education in the law school curriculum. This call has received renewed strength in the Carnegie Report released in 2007. It reminds us again of the importance of building skills for lawyering, for serving as counselors to those who seek our assistance.

Marquette University Law School, for over thirteen years, has been polishing a gem that provides our students with a rich opportunity to some of the very skills required to be an effective lawyer (you might remember the list from the first blog…communication, listening, writing, negotiation and time management, to list only the top five survey responses). This gem is the Small Claims Mediation Clinic.

The Small Claims Mediation Clinic is housed in the Milwaukee County Courthouse and provides pro se litigants an opportunity to access student-led mediation services in an effort to resolve the disputes themselves. This program was the brainchild of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske and I have had the honor and privilege to work with Janine at the Clinic for several years and have served as the faculty member for a number of semesters.

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Difficulties Arising Out of No-Merit Reports

Under Wisconsin Statute 809.32(1), an attorney representing a criminally convicted client on appeal must file a no-merit report if he or she:

concludes that a direct appeal on behalf of the [client] would be frivolous and without any arguable merit within the meaning of Anders v. California, 386 U.S. 738 (1967), and the [client] requests that a no-merit report be filed or declines to consent to have the attorney close the file without further representation by the attorney.

A no-merit report is essentially as it sounds, a report to the Court of Appeals stating that the client has no arguable case.  Once a no-merit report is filed, the client may choose to respond.  If the client does not respond, or does and the court finds that there are no meritorious claims, the court will affirm the conviction.

This situation, however, brings to light an interesting predicament for convicted individuals. 

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