​A legal victory — and historic first
 
Almost 20 years after Congress voted for termination, the Menominee tribe was officially reborn. The Menominee Restoration Act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon on December 22, 1973.
 
“The Menominee Restoration Act was the first time that a tribe’s legal status was restored after being terminated,” said NARF attorney Wilkinson, speaking to the Wisconsin Justice Initiative.
 
While many were involved, Deer is considered the driving force behind the success.
 
“Ada was the leader,” Wilkinson wrote in the foreword to Deer’s memoir. “The adoption of the Menominee Restoration Act announced the end of termination and the beginning of the tribal self-determination era. Without question, the single most important person in this transition was Ada Deer.”
 
Deer was elected the first woman to chair the tribe, serving from 1974 to 1976, helping her people chart a new course and reestablish relations with federal, state and neighboring governments.
 
Deer served in other roles during her working life, including as a lecturer with the American Indian Studies program and the School of Social Work at UW-Madison, returning to serve as American Indian Studies director.

Called to service in Washington
 
In 1993, appointed by President Bill Clinton, she became the first American Indian woman to direct the Bureau of Indian Affairs. On her watch, the federal government established government-to-government relationships with 226 Alaska Native villages and tribes, expanded self-governance to many other tribes, and approved the recognition of four tribes.
 
She recalled in her memoir how, during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Sen. Slade Gorton, a Republican from Washington state, asked her how long these welfare payments to Indians were going to continue.
 
“Excuse me, Senator,” Deer replied. “These are not welfare payments. As you know, this country was built on Indian land with Indian resources, and treaties lay out the nation’s obligations to Indians, and treaties are the supreme law of the land. These are permanent obligations and will continue.”
 
“I could hear the air being sucked out of the room,” she wrote. Connie Deer’s daughter was not going to let the welfare myth go unchallenged.
 
In the case of the Menominee, tribal homeland once encompassed 10 million acres. Twentieth century descendants had fought to restore the tribe’s claim to some 235,000 mostly forested acres.
 
“Few individuals have had as profound an impact on U.S. Indian policy as Ada has had,” wrote Theda Perdue, the historian and friend who, says Deer, co-authored the memoir.
 
Running like a Deer
 
Deer also ran for public office, twice for Wisconsin secretary of state, as well as for Congress against then-State Rep. David Clarenbach (the subject of another WJI Unsung Hero feature and someone she described as “a good guy”) in the 1992 Democratic primary. She beat Clarenbach but lost in the general election.
 
Her campaign slogan was “Nothing Runs Like a Deer.” When the John Deere company threatened to sue, the campaign said go ahead. Company officials apparently reconsidered how it would all look because no lawsuit materialized.
 
More recently, she served as a consultant on the American Indian exhibit at Chicago’s Field Museum. While no longer as active, Deer remains interested in social issues, including mass incarceration, adequate substance abuse treatment, and protecting the environment. Education and involvement, she said, remain the true paths to social justice and change.
 
“There are many opportunities to serve,” said Deer. “I want everyone to get a decent education and get involved, depending on their interests. And vote. I think every citizen should vote, and it should be an informed vote. We should appreciate our country and all that it offers.”​

This project is supported by grants from

​
​Winning consensus for consent
 
Then it was back to the matter of the Consenting Adults Bill. The measure was next offered as a budget amendment and approved by the Democratic Assembly caucus. That should have cleared a path for approval. Instead, a few Democrats said they couldn’t vote for the budget bill because of it.
 
Clarenbach made the difficult decision to withdraw the amendment. It was later reintroduced as a standalone bill in the next session of the Legislature, and despite pressure from the conservative right it won bipartisan approval.
 
“In retrospect, I am certain that withdrawing the earlier amendment was one of the things that contributed to getting the Consenting Adults Bill passed,” Clarenbach said. “Suddenly I was seen in a different light and that next session I got elected speaker pro tem.”
 
Democratic Gov. Tony Earl signed the Consenting Adults Bill into law on May 5, 1983.
 
Once again, the right words helped make the case for the change. The issue was cast as one of “sexual privacy” – including for married heterosexual couples – rather than the repeal of what was known as the anti-sodomy law.
 
It all made for some interesting debate. Clarenbach remembers quipping that “95% of the adults in Wisconsin have violated the law and the other 5% have no imagination.”
 
Lest anyone think Wisconsin was going too wild, the final version of the bill included a disclaimer that “Wisconsin does not approve of sexual conduct outside of the institution of marriage.”
 
The Consenting Adults Law ended an unusual legal situation created by the passage of the nondiscrimination bill, as the late Dick Wagner, a longtime gay advocate, activist and historian, once explained in an Our Lives article.
 
Consider, Wagner declared, the “strange anomaly that for a year homosexual acts were technically illegal but you could not discriminate against people for them.”
 
Clarenbach later won other legislative victories, including on bills banning discrimination in health care and insurance for patients with HIV/AIDS, signed into law by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson.​

On July 19, 1854, in a two-to-one decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court affirmed Smith’s decision to discharge Booth from custody. Whiton and Smith found that the state court had the power to protect the state’s citizens from illegal restraint, the warrant for Booth’s arrest failed to charge a crime, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was unconstitutional.

Whiton wrote the Act illegally conferred power on appointed commissioners, rather than judges. Second, he said, it denied the alleged fugitive the right to have his or her case tried to a jury in violation of the right to due process. Whiton focused on the danger to a free citizen of being taken into slavery when the evidence determining whether the person was a slave was presented in the state of the slave owner, with no opportunity for cross-examination of witnesses or submission of contrary evidence. The certificate of that court was then taken as conclusive in the state where the person was captured, causing the commissioner to order the person’s return.

“We are at a loss to perceive how this proceeding, by virtue of which a freeman becomes a slave, can be justly called ‘due process of law,’” Whiton wrote.

Smith concurred in a lengthy opinion based on the Constitution’s reservation of rights to the states. States, he wrote, retained the right to determine their own process for a slave owner’s claim.

“In Virginia he may be, indeed, a chattel; but in Wisconsin he is a MAN. . . the laws of Wisconsin regard him as a person here,” Smith wrote. Moreover, he said, there was no basis for federal law enforcement or court officials’ involvement in the return of slaves. He continued:

Had the Northern States imagined, that by assenting to this clause of the Constitution, they were thereby conferring upon the federal government the power to enter their territory in pursuit of a runaway negro, . . . to subject their houses to search, and to override their own laws and municipal regulations, and that they were parting with all power to regulate the mode of procedure by which that clause was to be carried into effect; does any sane man believe that they would ever have assented to it?

Crawford dissented, writing that the Wisconsin courts should decline to interfere with federal custody and that Congress had the constitutional power to pass the act. The dissent is thought to have caused his loss to Orsamus Cole in the 1855 election. 

Ableman, the marshal, sought review in the U.S. Supreme Court. The state Supreme Court clerk forwarded the record to the U.S. Supreme Court when ordered. 

This is the second of two posts about Joshua Glover. Read the first one here.

Meanwhile, in July 1854, Booth, and two other men who assisted Glover were indicted on criminal charges of aiding a fugitive slave in violation of the 1850 act. One, John Messenger, who had spirited the just-escaped Glover to a abolitionist's home in Waukesha, died shortly after his arrest and release on bail. The other, attorney John Rycraft, who had created a "vigilance committee" to ensure Glover's rights were protected, was tried and convicted in November 1854 and sentenced to ten days in jail and a fine of $200.

Booth’s criminal trial took place in early January 1855. The jury found him guilty, and Miller sentenced him to one month of imprisonment and a fine of $1,000, with Booth to remain in custody until the fine was paid. 

A few days later Booth and Rycraft applied to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for writs of habeas corpus, arguing that the federal court trial proceedings were void. The Wisconsin Supreme Court held, this time 3-0, that Booth’s and Rycraft’s convictions were illegal and ordered them discharged from imprisonment. All three justices agreed that the indictments in the cases failed to charge and the evidence at the federal trial failed to prove any offense within the jurisdiction of the federal court. ​

By Margo Kirchner

First of two parts

The capture and escape of Joshua Glover in southeastern Wisconsin in 1854 sparked an abolitionist outcry and an attempt by the Wisconsin Supreme Court and Legislature to nullify federal slavery law.

Two years earlier, Glover had escaped from slavery in St. Louis and established a life in freedom in Racine, but federal deputy marshals captured him in his home under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Outraged citizens of Milwaukee and Racine broke Glover out of jail and sent him on the Underground Railroad. Glover eventually reached safety in Canada.

Although Glover departed Wisconsin by mid-April 1854, his legal impact here had just begun. His escape from custody led to a struggle between state and federal authorities and the state’s defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Benammi Stone Garland purchased Glover, then known only by his first name, on January 1, 1850, on the steps of the St. Louis Courthouse. In May 1852, Glover escaped from Garland’s farm and crossed the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois. Garland placed a reward notice in a Missouri newspaper on May 19, 1852, and ran the notice for about two weeks.

Glover traveled about 350 miles to Racine, arriving in late spring or early summer. Racine was a bustling community of 5,000 people due to its trading post, harbor, and plank road to Janesville. About 60 Black or mixed-race adults were recorded in the city’s 1850 census.

Glover found a job at a sawmill on the Root River a few miles out of town. He chose his last name and had his own home, where he lived freely for two years. 

Wisconsin’s antislavery movement was active by the early 1850s. The Burlington Liberty Association, the first antislavery society in the state, had been around since 1844. Sherman Booth published an abolitionist newspaper in Milwaukee called the Free Democrat. Chauncey Olin published the abolitionist American Freeman newspaper in Waukesha. The Underground Railroad (UGRR) stopped in Waukesha and elsewhere. And, as described by authors Ruby West Jackson and Walter T. McDonald, Racine was a “hotbed of abolitionist sympathizers.”*

Clayborn Benson, executive director of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, said in a recent interview that abolitionists were motivated by several reasons. Some opposed slavery on religious grounds, while others opposed slavery for political purposes as part of the developing Republican Party. Some were European immigrants with ancestors who had been enslaved, while “free-soilists” did not want to compete against the South’s unpaid labor when it came to agriculture. 

Although Wisconsin’s antislavery movement was vigorous, Blacks nevertheless were not close to being treated equally with Whites. They had the right to assemble and act as jurors, said Benson. But Blacks were still denied the right to vote, and Whites did not want Blacks living nearby. In 1850 Milwaukee, about 100 Blacks lived in a city of 20,000.

Political battles raged in the nation over slavery in territories and newly formed states. Sentiment ran strongly in Wisconsin against slavery and its reach northward, and there was strong opposition  to returning  escaped slaves who had become Wisconsin residents. Many people in Wisconsin wanted “no part of enslavement,” said Benson.​

Slavery’s reach from the South, however, found support in the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Article IV, section 2 of the U.S. Constitution provided that a slave in one state would not be discharged from service by escaping to another state and would be delivered back to his or her owner on demand. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 established a process for slave owners to reclaim runaway slaves, but in southern eyes it did not have teeth.

As part of the Compromise of 1850 between northern and southern states, a new fugitive slave act beefed-up the rights of slave owners to recover escaped slaves. A slave owner could obtain a court order in his home state confirming the status of a slave, then proceed to find and arrest the escapee with the assistance of federal marshals. A U.S. commissioner, rather than a regular district judge, could determine the fate of the person. Notably, the commissioner received a larger fee for sending a fugitive to slavery than for releasing him or her. The alleged fugitive slave was denied a jury trial or any other opportunity for testimony or defense. Moreover, the act created criminal penalties for citizens who helped escaped slaves or interfered with their return.

This is the first of two posts about Joshua Glover. Read the second one here.


The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 “brings fire” to northern abolitionists and made them determined to help fugitives reach Canada, said Benson. Wisconsin politics included disagreements regarding whether the state had to defer to the federal government’s efforts to enforce the 1850 act. From 1850 to 1860 “there is turmoil,” Benson said. 

Garland remained intent on reclaiming Glover under the 1850 act. He somehow learned that Glover was in Wisconsin and provided a St. Louis court with proof of his ownership and Glover’s escape. The court ordered Glover’s removal from Wisconsin. 

Garland arrived in Milwaukee in early March 1854 with a St. Louis police officer and the Missouri court order. He swore out an affidavit and presented his paperwork to U.S. District Judge Andrew G. Miller, who issued a warrant for Glover’s arrest. 

Deputy U.S. Marshal Charles Cotton accompanied Garland and the St. Louis police officer to Racine, where they were joined by another federal deputy marshal.

Garland and the officers surprised Glover at his home on Friday, March 10, 1854. After a physical struggle the officers subdued Glover and led him away in shackles. Several reports indicate that Glover was bruised and bloodied during the capture.

Possibly because of the small size of the Racine jail or the abolitionist forces in Racine, the captors transported Glover to Milwaukee County’s larger and stronger jail located in Courthouse Square (now Cathedral Square). ​

By Gretchen Schuldt

​Fewer than 30 years had passed since the end of the Civil War when Canadian-born William T. Green graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1892, one of the first Black people to do so.

​He was by then 31 or 32 years old. 

Law degree in hand, he settled in Milwaukee, where he became the city's first and only Black attorney. By that time, he already had authored the state's first civil rights bill. 

Green's enrollment in law school was fortuitous, according to a September 1893 Milwaukee Journal newspaper story. The short, one paragraph account announced a benefit for Green, "a colored lawyer of the city, who was stricken with paralysis some time ago." 

"Years ago he was an errand boy in Milwaukee, but later obtained a position about the state university building," the newspaper reported. "He was without money and although eager to learn was unable to provide himself with an education. One of the professors one day found him with his ear to the keyhole listening to a law lecture. Attracted by the lad's earnestness to learn the professor helped him through college and he graduated a year or two ago with high honors."

Green, as a young man, watched as the country moved away from its commitment to civil rights. In 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a federal law prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations.

​The move had ramifications in Wisconsin. Black people were turned away from taverns and other public places; some attending a teachers' convention in Madison were not allowed to register at hotels, according to the summer 1966 issue of the Wisconsin Magazine of History.

The small Black population (304 people in 1880) began pushing for a state law that would do what federal law no longer did. 

Then in 1889, Owen Howell, a Black man, bought a ticket to a play. When he went to the Bijou Opera House in Milwaukee, he was denied his seat and an usher instead directed him to the gallery. Howell sued in Milwaukee County Circuit Court.

Black leaders in the city, including Green, held a convention to show off their increasing political strength – the city's Black population was by then about 449 –  and to push for a new civil rights league, which was indeed established. Green also helped organize a meeting to censure the Bijou's owner. The meeting drew about 75 people – about 17% of the city's Black population.

Howell won his case and was awarded $100 and costs. 

Law student Green, meanwhile, was busy with his civil rights bill. It was drafted in late 1889, and introduced in January 1891 by a one-term legislator, Orren T. Williams. Republicans at the time were the advocates for civil rights.

They also were in the legislative minority that term.

The bill would have provided equal access to a variety of public accommodations, including restaurants, saloons, barber shops, theaters, and transportation conveyances. Violations would be punishable by fines of $25 to $500 and incarceration for up to one year.

The debate in the Judiciary Committee was overtly racist.

"Where is the man on this floor who will say the colored man is the equal of the white man?" Assemblyman John Winans asked. "God did not create them equal."

First the bill was watered down. Then it was defeated. 

"Mr. Williams, who introduced it, wanted it killed because it had been limited to hotels and common carriers," The Milwaukee Journal reported.

By Colleen Ball

​Lavinia Goodell, Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer, is mostly known for her epic battle with Chief Justice Edward Ryan. In 1875, he denied her admission to practice before the Wisconsin Supreme Court solely because of her gender. According to Ryan:

The law of nature destines and qualifies the female sex for the bearing and nurture of the children of our race and for the custody of the homes of the world and their maintenance in love and honor. And all life-long callings of women, inconsistent with these radical and sacred duties of their sex, as is the profession of law, are departures from the order of nature; and when voluntary, treason against it.

Chief Justice Ryan crossed swords with the wrong woman. Goodell assailed his decision in the national press. She drafted a bill to prohibit gender discrimination in the practice of law, persuaded male legislators to pass it, and a male governor to sign it. Her triumph opened the Wisconsin bar to women, but her many other impressive feats are scarcely known.

Along the way, Goodell circulated Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s suffrage petitions around Janesville, co-founded the Janesville women’s temperance association, served as vice president of the Society for the Advancement of Women, and vice president of the American Women’s Association. She was Wisconsin’s signatory to the 1878 Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which the U.S. Congress ultimately passed in 1920 as the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

The list goes on even though Goodell practiced law just six years and spent the last three of them battling ovarian cancer, which took her life at age 41. She did not smash barriers for the glory of it. She did it because she believed that women had as much right to social, civil, and political equality as anyone else. She shrewdly persuaded influential male lawyers, judges, and politicians to her point of view, which then opened doors for women. Yes, she blazed trails. Just as important, she inspired and actively helped others to venture onto them.

Learn more about Lavinia Goodell by visiting www.laviniagoodell.com or taking this walking tour of her Janesville stomping grounds.

Please help us identify people and events that deserve more recognition for their place in Wisconsin’s legal history. You can send as much information as you want, but at minimum we need:

-The name of the person / identity or name of event
-A picture, if available
-A brief description of the person or event and the person or event’s impact on Wisconsin law or legal history
-Where we can find out more about the person or event
​
Please send the information to [email protected] or mail it to WJI, P.O. 
Box 100705, Milwaukee, WI 53210

​Thank you!

This project is supported by:

By Gretchen Schuldt

​When ​Kathleen Rose Harney married Joseph Michael Kruzel in 1971, she kept using her own name. And there the trouble began.

Her employer, Milwaukee Public Schools – Harney was a first-year art teacher – told her that she either had to use her husband's name or go to court and legally change her name to "Harney" if she wanted to add Joseph Kruzel to her health insurance policy.

The marriage, after all, meant that her name was no longer hers, according to her employer. MPS was not alone in that belief. Harney's wedding announcement in The Milwaukee Journal referred to her as "Mrs. Joseph Michael Kruzel" and the "former Miss Kathleen Rose Harney."

​Even Harney herself believed she gave up her name. 

"I didn't really want to," she said in an interview. "I thought you had to."

Harney went to court. She appeared before Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Ralph J. Podell in December 1972 and asked the judge for permission to use the name that was hers since birth and that she had used on her marriage certificate. Technically, she asked to "change" her name from one she had never even used.

"That's when things snowballed," said Harney, who now lives in Wauwatosa. 

She was called to the stand during the hearing she thought would be routine.

"All they asked is, 'What's your name and are you pregnant?'" she said. Then the judge told her to sit down, she said, and the men in the room discussed what her name should be.

The judge denied her request for the good of any future children she might have. Having parents with different names would be bad for the young ones, he said.

If two people getting married can't agree on a single name, he said, "it would be better for them, any children they may have, and society in general that they do not enter into the marriage relationship."

Podell also said that he "feels very strongly that family unity also requires that all members thereof bear the same legal name" and "this court feels she should carry her husband's name."

Harney said her lawyer told the judge he rather agreed with him.

The February 1973 ruling made the newspapers. "Maiden Name Plea Rejected By Court," the Journal reported.

"My in-laws saw it in the paper," Harney said. "It didn't go over well."

It took a while for her in-laws to speak to her again, she said. 

Attorney  Priscilla Ruth MacDougall, who specialized in women's issues, found out about the ruling  and contacted Harney. The naming precedent was bad and should not stand, MacDougall said. Would Harney consider an appeal?

"We just got married and we're buying furniture," Harney, then 22, told her. "We can't afford an attorney."

MacDougall said she and others would find the money. Harney appealed; the state Supreme Court accepted the case.

Harney's appellate lawyer was a rookie attorney named Joan Kessler, who took the case pro bono. 

"I was just young and out of school and what did I know?" said Kessler, who would later serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin and a state appeals court judge.​

​"Everyone was astounded" at Podell's decision," she said. It already was clear that a person's name was a matter of choice, she said. There simply was no law on the books requiring a woman to take her husband's name.

Kessler drafted a brief for the state Supreme Court. Since she was headed to New York for an American Bar Association meeting, she thought she would seek help from a more experienced lawyer – ACLU attorney Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who filed an amicus brief in Harney's support.*

Ginsburg invited Kessler to her apartment.

"I got to meet Ruth," Kessler said. Ginsburg read the younger lawyer's brief "while I was sitting there," Kessler said. 

Kessler liked a William Shakespeare quote that Ginsburg used in her ACLU brief. With Ginsburg's permission, Kessler used it in her own as well:​

"Why, as a condition of marriage," Kessler asked in her brief, "should this state compel one party to the marriage to exact from the other party so dear a price as one's own name? No rational answer suggests itself."

Podell's lawyer, Bruce O'Neil, argued that Podell did not abuse his discretion in refusing to allow Harney to use her own name. He told the court that Podell's decision was "neither sexist nor chauvinist," the Journal reported.

"It is submitted that whatever doubt may have existed in the trial court's mind vanished, when the appellant and her husband informed the court that, if they had children, they would give them surnames composed of a hyphenation of their two surnames," he said in his brief. "The trial court may well have asked what surnames they anticipated their grandchildren would bear, if one of their hyphenated children married the hyphenated child of two other parents bearing different legal surnames. And if they lived to see their great-grandchildren, they might well encounter a child listing under the burden of a hyphenated surname made up of eight different surnames."

The court rejected O'Neil's arguments.

Podell's points "could well be valid under proper circumstances, but only if proof were adduced to support the conclusions," Justice Nathan Heffernan wrote for the majority. "The reasons given for the denial of the change of name are completely conclusory and without any evidence of their applicability to the situation before the court....Unsupported generalizations do not constitute a cause shown to deny a change of name."

The court also made a broader, more significant finding: "We conclude...that the common law in Wisconsin has never ossified to the point of a holding that a wife is required to take her husband's name. The implicit assumption is to the contrary." ​

The Unsung Heroes in Wisconsin Legal History is supported by grants from the Milwaukee Bar Association Foundation and the Wisconsin Law Foundation.

By Gretchen Schuldt

​(Updated 6/7/21 to correct Booth's biography.)

​Ezekiel Gillespie, born a slave, grew up to win the right to vote for Wisconsin's Black men. (All women would have to wait a while.)

Gillespie may be one of the better-known unsung heroes in Wisconsin's legal history – he at least has a pocket park named after him – but his story seems especially timely now, as the Legislature works diligently to increase restrictions on who can vote and when.

Gillespie was born a slave in Georgia. His mother also was enslaved and his father reportedly was their owner. Reports about how Gillespie got his freedom are contradictory, but he may have bought his freedom from his own father. 

State voters were asked in an 1849 constitutional referendum whether the voting franchise should be extended to African American men. There were numerous political offices up for a vote at the same time. The franchise referendum passed, 5,265 to 4,075, but a lot of voters who went to the polls didn't vote on the referendum question at all – they were more interested in other items on the ballot. Because the referendum did not receive a majority of all the votes cast that day, officials said, it failed.

By Margo Kirchner and Gretchen Schuldt

WJI is launching a project to fill some of the holes of Wisconsin legal history. 

We're looking for the people and events that played significant but largely overlooked roles in the state's legal development. 

There are likely many holes that can be filled; we just don’t know about them yet because the people and events have been deleted or relegated to the background for decades or longer. Their stories need to be told so we have a more comprehensive view of Wisconsin legal history.
​
This project was inspired by the absence of diversity in the four murals, completed in 1915, that hang in the State Supreme Court. 

They depict historic events and that's all well and good, but the only mural that includes people of color depicts a murder trial where the defendant is a Native American and the person being celebrated is a White male judge, one with a somewhat cloudy historical reputation. 

The other murals celebrate events that occurred in different times and places.

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This mural represents Roman law, showing Caesar Augustus Octavius presiding over the trial of a soldier; the scene depicts all White men. ​

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There are a lot of people and historic events not recognized in the Supreme Court art. The murals are definitely a product of their time.

But it's a different time now. 

We want to hear about the great variety of people and events that shaped Wisconsin legal history. 

The people don’t have to be lawyers, but they must have played a significant role in advancing the cause of justice in Wisconsin. A plaintiff in a civil rights lawsuit could qualify, for example, or a defender of consumer rights, or someone who broke down a legal barrier so others could succeed. 

We also are looking for the significant events that brought about positive change in Wisconsin law or in Wisconsin’s legal system, whether those events occurred in or outside of a courtroom.

​White people, Black people, Brown people, men, women, children. Protests, court decisions, orations – let's hear about them!

We will publish information about these folks and events on our blog; funding willing, WJI eventually will transform the information into a book and make it available to the public. We also have various events in mind to celebrate these unsung characters and occasions.

Please help us identify people and events that deserve more recognition for their place in Wisconsin’s legal history. You can send as much information as you want, but at minimum we need:

-The name of the person / identity or name of event
-A picture, if available
-A brief description of the person or event and the person or event’s impact on Wisconsin law or legal history
-Where we can find out more about the person or event

We are closing this phase of the project on Nov. 15.

Please send the information to [email protected] or mail it to WJI, P.O. 
Box 100705, Milwaukee, WI 53210