Studying law Archives - Lavinia Goodell

Jan

2024

“I should like to be admitted next summer.”

Lavinia Goodell, December 1873

In January of 1874, exactly 150 years ago, Lavinia Goodell was in the final stages of her law studies and was beginning to plan how and when she would be admitted to practice law. Shortly before Christmas 1873, she wrote to her sister Maria, “I am studying Greenleaf’s evidence. It is very interesting, and I wish I hadn’t anything else to do but just go ahead on my law. I should like to be admitted next summer, but don’t know how it will be.”

Lavinia Goodell’s letter to her sister, December 18, 1873

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Dec

2019

Lavinia passes the bar: “[T]he judge proceeded to question us in quite an alarming manner”

Today, in most states, the bar exam involves an 8-week prep course and several days of written tests, which are administered at set times each year. In 1874, the experience was quite different, especially for Lavinia Goodell, the first woman admitted to the bar in Wisconsin.

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Dec

2019

“Law offices, suffering for want of students to help, … and yet they would not let me in, because I was a woman.”

Lavinia Goodell, 1873

It is a common misconception that Belle Case LaFollette, wife of Wisconsin Governor and U.S. Senator Fighting Bob LaFollette, was Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer. While Belle was the first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin Law school in 1885, five years after Lavinia’s death, Lavinia became the state’s first woman attorney in 1874 after studying the law on her own for over two years and then passing an examination in the Rock County Circuit Court. Entering the profession without going to law school was quite common at the time. Many of Lavinia’s sisters in law followed the same path.

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