Perils of becoming a “national law school”

The University of Wisconsin School of Law has over the years earned a justified resputation as a major national law school.  Its in-state rival, Marquette, also has a national focus.  But it’s the national focus that might give the school sproblems in keeping one of their prized benefits: the in-state diploma privilege.  Three legal academics now on the federal bench are expressing doubt that the schools really are focused on Wisconsin law.

Wisconsin gives automatic bar admissions to graduates of the state’s two law schools, UWM and Marquette — the last state in the Union to grant a diploma privilege now that West Virginia and Mississippi have stopped the practice.  That policy is under attack in a class action by students who didn’t attend those schools, and at oral argument last week three judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit expressed doubt that the state’s justification for the privilege — that students at the two law schools got a grounding in Wisconsin law that others do not — was anything more than a “fiction.”

Interstingly, all three judges on the panel are themselves legal academics.  Judges Richard Posner (J.D. Harvard) and Diane Wood (Texas) both served on the faculty at the University of Chicago.  Senior Judge Kenneth Ripple (UVA) is a long-time faculty member at Notre Dame.

Since the action was dismissed below without developing a record to support the state’s claim that its law schools are uniquely focused on Wisconsin law, the two schools will have the opportunity to demonstrate their point of difference..  Over at Conglomerate Blog, former UWM professor Gordon Smith points out that in Contracts classes the “Wisconsin Materials” used in all sections (the Macaulay-Kidwell-Whitford Contract Law in Action) do put a heavy emphasis on the law of the Badger State.

[Frank Snyder]