“Petition denied.”

One hundred fifty years ago, the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued one of its most famous – and infamous – decisions. The afternoon edition of the Tuesday, February 15, 1876 Wisconsin State Journal contained a list of the opinions the court had handed down earlier that day. Two of those opinions were written by Chief Justice Edward Ryan. The first was a routine matter: the denial of a writ of mandamus. The second was the denial of Lavinia Goodell’s motion to become the first woman admitted to the bar of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Although the opinion was authored by Chief Justice Ryan, the other two justices agreed that Wisconsin statutes permitted only men to practice law. In all likelihood, the justices viewed this case as a run-of-the-mill application of the principles of statutory interpretation. Little did they know that their ruling would set in motion a course of events that would forever change the practice of law in Wisconsin.

Lavinia learned of the decision the following day and made the terse notation in her diary, “Am refused admittance to Sup. Ct.”

Lavinia had lost this battle and was bitterly disappointed, but she was by no means defeated, and her persistence led, thirteen months later, to a change in the law that specifically stated that no person in Wisconsin may be denied a license to practice law on account of sex. Generations of women lawyers have benefitted from her firm stance against the exclusion of women from the legal profession.

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Where is the line to be drawn between “you may do this” and “you must not do that”?

Henry Ward Beecher, March 1876

One hundred fifty years ago, Henry Ward Beecher was one of the most famous men in the United States. The Brooklyn, New York Congregationalist preacher was a lifelong proponent of equal rights for women. He was also a personal friend of Lavinia Goodell, Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer. (Read more about Lavinia’s relationship with Beecher here.) So it was not surprising that when the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to allow Lavinia to practice before it due to her gender, Beecher wrote a strong rebuke in his weekly paper, The Christian Union.

He wrote:

Has woman the right to earn her own living in her own way? Reduced to its practical shape this is the question which the Wisconsin Supreme Court has decided in the negative in refusing to admit Miss Lavinia Goodell to practice at its bar. The old common law, it seems is to blame for this; at least their “honors” fall back upon it in the absence of an express statute authorizing the gentler sex to enter the legal profession.

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