Academic

Wisconsin's Diploma Privilege

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

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As a former Contracts professor at Wisconsin, I can attest that every section of Contracts uses the so-called "Wisconsin Materials," which are heavy on Wisconsin law. Indeed, when I taught that casebook at BYU last year, the students asked why we were learning so much Wisconsin law. Of course, the value of the casebook for people outside of Wisconsin isn't to teach Wisconsin law, but to use Wisconsin as an exemplar of how a single state might deal with certain doctrines. Nevertheless, for people inside Wisconsin, the peek into Wisconsin courts is useful. (Last year I supplemented the materials with lectures on Utah contract cases. The pool of cases is much shallower here, and the courts are much more predictable.)

While the Wisconsin School of Contracts makes the study of Contracts somewhat distinctive, one also perceives a strong Wisconsin focus in the work of the Remington Center and other clinical opportunities at the Law School. My sense is that the faculty at Wisconsin have an unusually strong attachment to the home state's law, even if that seems foreign to two judges who have spent their academic careers at the University of Chicago Law School.

Beyond the classroom, Wisconsin has a long tradition -- expressed in the University's Wisconsin Idea -- of connecting the study of law to the State of Wisconsin. The heyday for this work may have been the 1960s, which saw the publication of Stewart Macaulay's Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study, 28 American Sociological Rev. 1 (1963), Willard Hurst's Law and Economic Growth: A Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836-1915 (1964), and Lawrence Friedman's Contract Law in America: Social and Economic Case Study (1965), among other important works. Scholarly work centered on Wisconsin seems to have declined in recent years, though I was laying the groundwork for an empirical study of the local entrepreneurial culture before I moved, and I remember feeling that those older works legitimated to some extent the decision to focus on Wisconsin companies. My guess is that most of the scholarly work focused on Wisconsin law today comes from the Remington Center, but I am no expert on the current state of things.

This blog post is not offered as a complete justification of the State's defense of the diploma privilege, but rather as some mild pushback on the assumption that the University of Wisconsin Law School is no different from law schools in Indiana, Illinois, North Dakota, or Oklahoma. While Wisconsin prides itself on being a national law school, the connection to Wisconsin was still much in evidence while I was there.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on April 11, 2009 (boomark / email).