Legal News

Is Wisconsin?s ?Diploma Privilege? Illegal? We?re Not Gonna Know Now

By Ashby Jones

About a year ago, we wrote about a lawsuit in which a Wisconsin lawyer named Christopher Wiesmueller had challenged the state’s so-called “diploma privilege.”

If you don’t know what the diploma privilege is, you haven’t taken the bar exam of any state. Because it invariably comes up when you’re studying for the bar — some smart-alecky know-it-all will tell you what it is: That graduates of the law schools at the University of Wisconsin and Marquette University don’t have to take the Wisconsin bar in order to practice in the Badger State. It hardly seems fair, you think, and you secretly hope that someone will sue because, well, your misery wants a little Wisconsin company.

For all those who have experienced those sensations recently, we’ve got some sad news for you: Wiesmueller and his wife have settled his lawsuit for $7500, and Wisconsin ain’t budging on the privilege. Click here for the story, from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

While he was a law student in Oklahoma, Wiesmueller filed what became a federal class-action lawsuit against the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the Board of Bar Examiners. Wiesmueller’s suit argued that the diploma privilege violated the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

But last year, U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb decertified the class, and last week, the Wiesmueller agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for $7,500.

Christopher Wiesmueller told the Journal-Sentinel that after 3 1/2 years, he was tired of the case. Because the class had been decertified, he was left representing only his wife. Thing is, his wife was slated to take the Wisconsin bar exam in July, so he would have had to find a new plaintiff.

Wiesmueller told the paper, however, that he hasn’t changed his mind about the issue.

“It’s still out there. If someone else wants to take this up, more power to them,” he said Wednesday.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 26, 2010 (boomark / email).