Our interactive timeline showcases just a few of the history makers — 150 years of people, places and ideas — that distinguish UW Law from all the rest.
This 150-year timeline starts in 1868 and ends in 2018. Visit the UW Law School website to learn more about what’s going on at the Law School today.
150-Year Timeline (1868-2018)
Timeline
First UW Law classes held
The first UW Law School classes were held in 1868 in the State Capitol Building, shown here before the construction of its dome. (Photo: Wisconsin Historical Society)
Dean Edwin Bryant
“The established lawyer is always a public man, and his influence on affairs is always more or less potent. His office well-stocked with books, is one from which no fitful gust of the popular will can turn him out. His income is not precarious, nor his independence fettered. He is above the wiles of the politician or the caprice of the populace.”
—Edwin Bryant, dean from 1889 to 1903, in his farewell address to the Class of 1891, which included two women graduates.
First Law Building established
In 1891, the state legislature appropriated funds for the construction of a law building on UW-Madison’s Bascom Hill. The new building opened in September 1893.
William Green, first African-American graduate
After graduating from UW Law School in 1892, William Green (1860-1911) practiced law in Milwaukee and was a leader in the community’s civil rights movement. In Howell v. Litt, he became the first black attorney to argue (and win) a case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The case led to the creation of the Wisconsin Civil Rights Act of 1895.
Law Library Opened its Doors
Prior to the opening of UW Law’s first permanent Law Library in 1893–the same year the first Law Building opened on Bascom Hill–many had complained about the inadequacy of the school’s library collection and services. In fact, when the Board of Regents created the UW’s College of Law in 1868, no money had been appropriated for books.
Dean Harry S. Richards
Harry S. Richards, dean from 1903 to 1929, memorialized at his death in a 1929 Wisconsin Law Review tribute:
“The great work of his life was the law school of the University of Wisconsin. When he came to this school as dean in 1903, he found a school of position and standing, but one which was committed quite generally to the older method of teaching; a method which was just beginning to be displaced by the new, and in the displacing of which, in the West, Mr. Richards was one of the prominent leaders.”
Dean Oliver Rundell
UW Law School alumni Oliver Rundell was acting dean for two separate terms — from 1929 to 1932, and again from 1943 to 1945 — before serving officially as dean between 1945 and 1953. At his death in 1958, law faculty published “memorial resolutions” in the Wisconsin Law Review, which included this excerpt:
“Two devotions shaped Oliver Rundell’s professional life: first, service to the University as a teacher and administrator; second, study of the law of property, the focus of his teaching and research, in order to clarify whatever was obscure, and to make it a better servant of human needs.”
Dean Lloyd K. Garrison
Besides serving as UW Law dean from 1932 to 1945, Lloyd K. Garrison also led a number of governmental organizations, including the National Labor Relations Board and the National War Labor Board. He briefly served as special assistant to the United States Attorney General.
John Steuart Curry mural completed in 1942
Law Dean Garrison, the great-grandson of famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, commissioned John Steuart Curry’s iconic ‘Freeing of the Slaves’ for UW’s Law Library after the U.S. Department of Justice rejected it as controversial. Garrison felt a strong connection to the work:
“Here is one of the great events in our constitutional history, an event fashioned in the midst of a national crisis by a great lawyer-president. The mural not only symbolizes that event but proclaims in a noble and patriotic setting the dignity and freedom of all persons, however humble, in a democracy whose ideals of liberty are summed up and protected by the constitution.”
Vel Phillips, first female African American graduate
After earning her law degree in 1951, Vel Phillips went on to become the first woman to serve on Milwaukee’s Common Council, the first woman judge in Milwaukee County and the first African American judge in Wisconsin. She campaigned nationally for civil rights, waging a historic fair housing battle in Milwaukee. In 1978, she was the first woman and first African American to be elected as Wisconsin’s secretary of state. When Phillips died in 2018 at 95, she was eulogized in newspapers around the nation, including this New York Times obituary.
Dean John Ritchie
John Ritchie, UW Law dean from 1953 to 1957, also led the law schools of Washington University in St. Louis and Northwestern University.
“Probably a law school is at its best in educating the student to think clearly and exactly, to analyze and synthesize, to sift the relevant from the irrelevant, to beware of over-generalizing and to seek constantly for the reasons in policy and doctrine underlying legal rules and principles. In short, to think like a lawyer.”
Dean George H. Young
George H. Young, a 1941 UW Law graduate, served as dean from 1958 to 1968. According to an article in the Summer 1999 issue of The Gargoyle alumni magazine:
“As Dean, George Young would ask individual faculty members, ‘What can I do to help you achieve your goal?’ His approach was to build a strong faculty and then give them the support needed to achieve important teaching and research goals.”
Professor Marygold Melli, first female faculty member
As UW Law’s first woman tenure-track professor, Marygold Shire Melli (1926-2018) laid the groundwork for UW Law’s family law concentration, adding a wide range of courses to the original two-credit offering (then known as ‘domestic relations’). A trailblazer in her own right, Melli shaped pedagogy and policy, particularly in the areas of child support and shared child custody.
A mascot is born
In 1963, when the existing Law School was demolished to make way for a new building, Dean George Young found and rescued a sandstone gargoyle from the rubble. It was one of a pair of gargoyles that had sat on the roof of the 1893 building for nearly 70 years. That gargoyle, which became a symbol of the Law School, is on permanent display in the atrium. The second gargoyle, originally believed to have been destroyed during the 1963 demolition, was recovered in 2018 after spending nearly 70 years with the Paul Been ’53 family. It, too, is back at the Law School.
LEO Program Began
Launched in 1967, the Legal Education Opportunities Program has become a national model for recruiting and retaining students of color. Commonly known as LEO, the trailblazing program has graduated more than 1,500 attorneys, who actively serve their communities in a multitude of ways. As role models, mentors, and scholarship donors, LEO alumni also support future generations of lawyers. (Pictured, a group of LEO students in 2017, the 50th anniversary of the program.)
Dean Spencer L. Kimball
“The difference between a good and a poor lawyer, more than anything else, is his capacity to learn for himself what he needs to know.”
— Spencer Kimball, dean from 1968 to 1972
Professor James Jones, first African American faculty member
After receiving his J.D. from UW Law in 1956, Jim Jones (1924-2014) moved to Washington, D.C. to serve as an attorney with the U.S. Department of Labor. There, he worked on historic legislation, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Philadelphia Plan, a groundbreaking affirmative action program for government contractors. He returned to the Law School in 1969, when he became its first African American faculty member. He was a scholar of labor law and industrial relations, which he taught until his retirement in 1997.