Melli blossomed as UW’s first female law professor

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By the time the average person turns 82, even retirement may seem like a distant memory. But Marygold “Margo” Melli is not your average person. For more than five decades, Melli has been both an educator and an advocate for family law issues.

After becoming the first female faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1959, Melli developed the current family law curriculum. Even though she took emeritus status in 1993, Melli continues to campaign for improvements to juvenile justice. She took time on March 6 to meet with Wisconsin Law Journal reporter Jack Zemlicka to discuss her decision to teach family law, how pro se litigants have changed divorce proceedings and why she never became a practicing attorney.

Wisconsin Law Journal: After graduating UW-Law School in 1950, what was the professional climate like for aspiring female attorneys?

Marygold S. Melli: There weren’t very many female attorneys, but there also weren’t very many jobs. I had difficulty getting a job. My favorite story involves the dean of the law school.

In those days when law firms came to interview students, the dean posted a list of the students he had chosen to be interviewed. It was a much smaller world and there weren’t that many law firms coming and even though I was near the top of my class, I was never on the list. So I gathered up my courage and went to see the dean and he looked at me and said, “Ms. Shire, none of those law firms would hire you, why should I waste their time?” That’s just the way it was back then.

WLJ: When you joined the law school in 1959, what was it like being the first female member of the faculty?

Melli: I think I was the 14th woman in the United States [to teach at a law school]. My colleagues were wonderful and the students were fine. Nobody said, “I don’t want a woman to teach me.” In those days there was only one women’s restroom in the whole law school building. I remember going in one day and another woman looked at me and asked which professor I worked for. How do your answer that? People would always assume I was somebody’s secretary or someone’s assistant.

WLJ: What is the biggest challenge female attorneys face today?

Melli: There are levels where women have not made it. For various reasons at the big law firms in the senior positions, there aren’t that many women. Why that is, I’m not sure, but a larger percentage of the bar are women.

Almost half the students at the law school are women and about a third of the faculty are women. Women seem to be accepted. I’m sure way down deep there are lots of reservations. But certainly on the surface there is no longer the prejudice. Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and she’s doing very well.

WLJ: Why did you decide to teach family law?

Melli: I worked for the legislature and worked on the Children’s Code and got involved in other things which made me think that the next big explosion in the law was going to be relating to families and children.

When I came to the law school the dean asked me what I wanted to teach. I said domestic relations, which is what family law was called at the time. He said that’s not a very interesting legal field. Another colleague said if I taught family law, everyone would think that was the only thing the law school would let me teach.

WLJ: You have written about the evolution of the bar examination process and the possibility of there being a national exam. Do you still foresee that change?

Melli: I think it’s beginning to happen. The law schools and the American Bar Association are looking at things like a national bar exam. Maybe I’m being overly optimistic, but I think there’s talk of this and it’s something I’m very much in favor of.

A multiple choice exam, called the multi-state exam, is given by most states. In a sense, it’s kind of become a national bar exam, but the only thing that isn’t national about it is that each state sets its own pass rates. If you take the multi-state exam and get a 98, you would get into Wisconsin, Minnesota and some other states, but probably not California. They don’t want more lawyers coming in. It’s hard to tell states what to do, but more and more states are letting you transfer your score.

WLJ: What is your take on the recent state Supreme Court decision removing the limit on how many times an attorney can take the bar exam in Wisconsin?

Melli: I haven’t thought a lot about it, except that sometimes you can be too nice to people. They can ruin their lives because they keep trying to pass the exam and they don’t. Some people just can’t make it and there ought to be a point when you say forget it and go on to other things. Some people never catch on so it seems to me it makes sense to say you can try so many times, and then that’s it.

WLJ: Wisconsin’s diploma privilege was recently challenged again in court. Even though you are a graduate of UW-Law School, should Wisconsin continue to be the last state which grants law students automatic admission to the bar?

Melli: I don’t think it’s going to change things if they don’t offer the diploma privilege. I think the court probably feels that the quality of Wisconsin lawyers is as good as elsewhere in the nation. So the law schools are producing competent lawyers. However, I am afraid that it isn’t fair to other law schools.

The rationale is that the Supreme Court overviews what we teach. I think we’ve been saved that nothing else has popped up. If you are in California where there are 50 million law schools, some of [them] are only out to take the people who cannot get into a regular law school. If there was a situation like that in Wisconsin, then the diploma privilege would be a real problem.

WLJ: As someone who worked to revise the Wisconsin Children’s Code, what did the Legislature get right?

Melli: As I look at the current code, one of the things I was most pleased with was that we had made sure that young people under the age of 18 always went into juvenile court. At the time of the revision I worked on, children 16 to 18 could go into either the juvenile or adult criminal court. It often depended on the police officer’s decision, rather than a more measured decision by a judge.

We changed that. In the 1990s the law changed again and we took the juvenile delinquents out of the Children’s Code and put them into a separate chapter of the statutes right next to the criminal statutes. Now the Legislature is rethinking the process and raising the age back up to 17 or 18. I think we got it right back in the ’50s.

WLJ: What is the biggest issue facing juvenile justice today?

Melli: Our ability to help and reform people is very limited. We’re always scrounging for money and we still haven’t solved the problem of rehabilitating these people. It was a problem when I was working on the code too.

At one point I served on a board which governed all the state institutions, including all the prisons. A social worker said to me, “We aren’t rehabilitating these young men. We’re habilitating them.” They had never known the kind of life we grew up with, meaning two parents, breakfast, lunch and dinner and a regular schedule. In his view, the fact that those kids got up at 6 a.m. every morning was a good thing.

WLJ: The number of pro se litigants in divorce and other family law cases is on the rise. How is that issue being addressed in the law school classroom?

Melli: The law school has a student clinic where students go to the courthouse here in Dane County and help people fill out the forms and explain their meaning. This not only helps the litigants who are getting divorces, but it helps the judges too. They don’t want the people coming in with forms filled out wrong.

The fact is most people in the long-run go through the process without litigating any of these things. These cases are settled, often by the parties themselves. A lawyer is a luxury that a lot of people can’t afford.

WLJ: Do you think it is ironic that you have spent a great deal of your career teaching, writing and speaking about divorce issues, but have been married for 58 years?

Melli: I guess I’m just lucky in having a great husband. Plus, we’re Roman Catholics and till death do us part. It never occurred to us that there was another way out.

WLJ: Even though you have had a prosperous career, do you ever wish you had practiced law?

Melli: I don’t think I’ve ever second thought that. It could be I’m just not imaginative enough. I chose fields that I was intellectually interested in, criminal law and family law, but those are not fields I would want to practice in. They are very difficult fields, so maybe that’s why I’ve never really regretted it.

WLJ: If you had not become a law professor, what career path might you have chosen?

Melli: I majored in international relations as an undergraduate. I went to law school thinking that would give me some additional qualifications for getting into what I was really interested in, which was international law. But I just never got there. I met my husband in law school. We got married and stayed here.

Sometimes I do rethink that. Those days there were Fulbright Scholarships and I remember thinking of applying for one, but who would ever give me one at the time? Now that I’m older and wiser I know that if I’d had gotten the application it might have changed my life.