Volume 42, No. 12
February 1, 2002
Two candidates for Illinois State Bar Association third vice president from Cook County filed nominating petitions on Jan. 15, the first day of the filing period.
Both are members of the ISBA Board of Governors. They are Robert J. Downs, a partner in the Oak Park firm of Downs & Downs, and Russell W. Hartigan, a partner in Hartigan & Cuisinier, Chicago.
Candidates' petitions for election as ISBA third vice president, members of the Board of Governors and Assembly may be filed through Friday, Feb. 15. Nine board seats and 26 Cook County Assembly positions are open.
The board seats up for election are: Under Age 37, Cook County; Under Age 37, Downstate; Area I (18th Circuit); Area III (12th, 13th, 16th and 21st Circuits); Area VII (1st, 2nd and 4th Circuits); Cook County, four seats.
Petitions may be filed at either the Illinois Bar Center in Springfield or the ISBA Chicago Regional Office. Petitions may not be filed by e-mail or facsimile.
Ballots will be mailed by April 1 to ISBA members in good standing whose dues are paid by March 1 for the period ending June 30. Ballots must be returned by May 10.
Elected members of the Board of Governors and Assembly will take office June 21 at the beginning of the 126th ISBA Annual Meeting at the Grand Geneva Resort in Lake Geneva, Wis. The new third vice president will take office June 24 at the conclusion of the meeting.
A special meeting of the ISBA Assembly has been called by President Tim Eaton for the afternoon. It will take place in the Old State Capitol, where the ISBA was formed on Jan. 4, 1877, by 88 delegates from 37 counties.
Past presidents of the state bar association will be honored during the Assembly meeting, and a reception will follow the business proceedings.
That evening, a commemorative banquet will be held in the Crowne Plaza Hotel. The highlight of this event will be the induction of a dozen 2002 Laureates of the Academy of Illinois Lawyers.
The ISBA Board of Governors will meet Wednesday morning, March 13, in the Crowne Plaza.
Complete details of the 125th anniversary celebration, and a schedule of activities, will be announced in future issues of the ISBA Bar News.
Lincoln tapped David Davis as first Illinois justice
By Stephen Anderson
David Davis lived here when he wasn't serving as the first Illinois lawyer on the U.S. Supreme Court, or as president pro tem of the U.S. Senate. This was his home when he was president of the Illinois State Bar Association in 1884.
In those days, Clover Lawn stretched over 1,200 acres of prime Bloomington real estate. Now the mansion sits majestically on a remaining four-acre site as a treasure of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the beneficiary of painstaking renovation in 1992.
David and Sarah Davis he from Maryland via Yale Law School and she from Massachusetts settled in 1839 in frontier Bloomington, where he had practiced law for three years. In 1844, they moved into a frame farmhouse on the first 200 acres of the Clover Lawn property.
That year, Davis was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, there becoming acquainted with Abraham Lincoln. A delegate to the 1847 Constitutional Convention, Davis fought successfully for election of judges by the people, not the legislature. A year later, he was elected a circuit court judge.
Judge Davis, a leader in the state's new Republican Party when the Whigs fell apart, became Lincoln's campaign manager for his election as president in 1860. Two years later, Lincoln appointed Davis to the Supreme Court.
Confirmed on Dec. 8, 1862, by the Senate on a voice vote, Davis replaced John A. Campbell, an Alabama jurist who had resigned to join the Confederate government of the South. The Illinois connection on the U.S. Supreme Court had begun.
Disenchanted with Republican politics after Lincoln's death, Justice Davis had hopes of becoming president. He declined a nomination in 1872 by the Labor Reform Party, when the Liberal Republicans picked Horace Greeley. Davis also could have been the Democrats' nominee in 1876.
Davis left the Supreme Court in 1877, after the Democrats in the Illinois legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate on the 40th ballot. He voted independently, serving as president pro tem in 1881-82 before he retired and returned to Clover Lawn for the last years of his life.
On June 26, 1886, after six days in a diabetic coma, David Davis died in Bloomington at age 71 and was buried in Evergreen City Cemetery next to Sarah.
His great grandson and great great grandson, both named David Davis, practiced law in Bloomington for several years. David Davis IV donated the mansion and grounds to the state in 1959. David Davis V died in 1998.
Illinoisans on the court
The Illinois tradition on the U.S. Supreme Court that David Davis started is carried on currently by John Paul Stevens, a University of Chicago Phi Beta Kappa scholar and 1947 magna cum laude graduate of the Northwestern University School of Law.
A prominent Chicago antitrust lawyer, Justice Stevens was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in 1970. President Gerald Ford nominated him in November 1975 to succeed William O. Douglas, and the nomination was confirmed unanimously on Dec. 17 by the U.S. Senate.
Justice Stevens was the keynote speaker for the 100th anniversary celebration of the Illinois State Bar Association. The Centennial dinner took place Jan. 22, 1977, in the Forum 30 Hotel in Springfield.
After David Davis left the court in 1877, it was 11 years before another Illinoisan was appointed. Melville Weston Fuller was born in Maine, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa at Bowdoin College.
After studying for six months at Harvard Law School and passing the bar exam in 1855, Fuller decided the booming railroad town of Chicago would be the place for him to embark on a real estate and commercial law practice. Ironically, he managed the 1858 senatorial campaign of Stephen Douglas against Abraham Lincoln.
Fuller served in the Illinois House in 1863-64 while his prosperous law practice included representing the City of Chicago in litigation over rights to property along the Lake Michigan shoreline.
After declining President Grover Cleveland's offer to become solicitor general, Fuller accepted a nomination to the Supreme Court vacancy of Morrison Waite as chief justice. The nomination was confirmed July 20, 1888, by the Senate on a 41-20 vote.
After Cleveland was re-elected in 1892, he asked Justice Fuller to become his secretary of state. Fuller refused because he thought it would lower the dignity of the court in the public eye. He remained on the court until his death on July 4, 1910, at his summer home in Maine.
A brief Illinois connection was established by Horace Harmon Lurton, a Kentucky native who entered the University of Chicago in 1860 at age 16. Soon thereafter, he joined the Confederate army's Kentucky and Tennessee infantry and was captured by Ulysses Grant's forces.
Escaping from Union incarceration, Lurton joined John Hunt Morgan's daredevil marauders but was caught again. He contracted tuberculosis in prison camp, and his mother persuaded President Lincoln to release him; he studied law at Cumberland University while he was recuperating.
Lurton became Tennessee's youngest chancellor in 1875, a superior court judge in 1886 and subsequently a judge of the federal Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. His nomination by President William Howard Taft was confirmed Dec. 20, 1909, and he served until his death in 1914.
Second Harlan seated
The next Illinoisan to make it to the Supreme Court was John Marshall Harlan, the son of prominent Chicago lawyer John Maynard Harlan and grandson of his namesake, Justice John Marshall Harlan, who had succeeded David Davis in 1877 and served until 1911.
The younger Harlan attended Princeton, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and graduated in 1924 from the New York Law School. He practiced with a New York City firm and was chief counsel to the state crime commission from 1951 to 1953 before an appointment to the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
Harlan was nominated by President Dwight Eisenhower to succeed Robert Jackson on the Supreme Court in November 1954, but the Senate postponed confirmation while it dealt with the censure of Joseph McCarthy.
Harlan was renominated in January 1955 and was confirmed March 16 on a 71-11 Senate vote. He died Dec. 29, 1971, and was succeeded by William Rehnquist.
Arthur Joseph Goldberg, a Chicagoan who graduated summa cum laude from the Northwestern University School of Law in 1930, was counsel to the Chicago Newspaper Guild during a 1938 strike and a special assistant to the O.S.S. during World War II.
Goldberg represented major labor unions and assisted in the merger of the CIO and AFL, serving as special counsel until 1961. He was Secretary of Labor for President John Kennedy, when he was nominated to replace Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court.
Confirmed Sept. 25, 1962, by the Senate in a voice vote, Justice Goldberg served less than three years before President Lyndon Johnson appointed him ambassador to the United Nations in July 1965. He resigned in 1968 and ran for governor of New York in 1970 before entering private practice in Washington. He died in 1990.
Harry Andrew Blackmun was born in Nashville, Ill., but practiced in Minnesota after graduating in 1932 from Harvard Law School. He served on the Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit from 1959 to 1970. Nominated for the Supreme Court by President Richard Nixon, he was confirmed May 12, 1970, by a unanimous 94-0 vote.
Justice Blackmun returned to Illinois frequently. He spoke at the dedications of the Hiram Lesar Building at the Southern Illinois University School of Law and the establishment of the Northern Illinois University College of Law in DeKalb. He received the Decalogue Society Award of Merit in Chicago in 1991.
Justice Blackmun retired from the court in 1994 and was succeeded by Stephen G. Breyer. He died in 1999.
Judge Mills speaks of Lincoln legend
Federal Judge Richard Mills of Springfield was busier than usual during the last two months of 2001. He spoke at both the state and federal bar admission ceremonies and at a naturalization ceremony for new citizens, paying tribute each time to the legend of Abraham Lincoln.
Judge Mills also celebrated his 35th year as a jurist at three levels: the circuit court, the Appellate Court and the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois.
He was sworn in Dec. 5, 1966, as a judge of the 8th Circuit. The ceremony took place in the Beardstown courtroom where Abraham Lincoln had defended Duff Armstrong in the famous "Almanac Trial."
The oath was administered by Appellate Justice Samuel O. Smith, whose seat on the appellate bench Judge Mills was elected to fill in 1976. He served until his appointment by President Ronald Reagan to the federal court in 1985.
In his remarks during the 4th District admission ceremony Nov. 8 in the Supreme Court Building, Judge Mills spoke at length about the legacy of Abraham Lincoln and his ideals as a lawyer.
He concluded with the observation that "No one can improve upon Mr. Lincoln's advice: 'Never stir up litigation.' Yours is a higher calling, because advocacy is the practical application of the law to the people it was meant to serve. And you, the advocate, are the profession's bridge between law and justice."
Mills also warned the class about "two very difficult things in this world. One is to make a good name for yourself, and the other is to keep it."
In a subsequent address to federal bar admittees, Mills traced the history of the District Court since its establishment in 1818, and the historic courtroom where Lincoln had practiced after his admission in December 1839 at the age of 30.
Also admitted that month were Stephen A. Douglas, later a U.S. senator and Lincoln's election debate opponent, and David Davis, whom Lincoln appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1862 and was president of the Illinois State Bar Association in 1884 (see related story).
Judge Mills said Lincoln "left a legacy of superb and incomparable legal ability," and he recalled that Davis said the future president "had few equals" as a trial lawyer.
The naturalization ceremony took place Nov. 20 in the Old State Capitol, where the ISBA will celebrate its 125th anniversary on March 12. Excerpts from the speech by Judge Mills to the new citizens follows.
Mills: Capitol played role in Lincoln's rise
"Abraham Lincoln was no stranger to this splendid Old State Capitol Building. He and eight of his legislative colleagues were primarily responsible for the seat of the Illinois state capital being moved from Vandalia to Springfield in 1937.
"Here, he drew pay warrants in the auditor's office, and used both the state library and the Supreme Court library to prepare speeches and legal briefs. Attorney Lincoln performed some of his most important and precedent-setting legal work in the state Supreme Court, pleading at least 243 cases in the court's chambers on the first floor below us.
"This Old State Capitol also played an important role in Lincoln's rise to political prominence. He was completing his fourth and final term in the state legislature when the House of Representatives convened for the first time in this very hall on Dec. 7, 1840. . .