Law School STILL Named After Slaveholder

In December, the committee formed to investigate the possibility of renaming UIC-John Marshall Law School voted 6-1 to go forward with the name change to drop references to the slaveholding former Supreme Court justice from the school’s name. Meanwhile, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University announced the formation of a similar committee but at this point continues to march forward hoping no one will notice that nothing’s being done.

Rename John Marshall, a group of lawyers in Cleveland and Chicago who seek to remove “Marshall” from school names, called upon new Housing and Urban Development Secretary Marcia Fudge,^[1] an alum of Cleveland State’s law school, to use her national prominence to urge the school to get moving on the issue.

John Marshall, the chief justice who laid the groundwork for the functioning of the federal judiciary and, indeed, the federal government writ large over the course of his tenure enjoys legendary status among legal nerds. He’s the top overall seed in SCOTUSBlog’s highly questionable “best Supreme Court justice” bracket. But scholarship suggests that the native Virginian was also one of the biggest slaveholders in America, something that his statements labeling slavery “evil” can’t overcome.^[2]

Some, like South Texas College of Law professor Josh Blackman, decry efforts to remove Marshall’s name as “cancel culture” because that’s the sort of right-wing clickbait that readers eat up over at the Volokh Conspiracy, a blog hosted by a white professor with a penchant for complaining that people don’t think he should use the n-word so much. We don’t put much stock in these “all slaveholders matter” arguments, though Blackman does make the good point that, as public schools, state lawmakers are bound to get involved. And in a place like increasingly retrograde Ohio, that’s likely to turn the battle over Cleveland State’s moniker into a circus sideshow.

A more nuanced approach than bleating about “cancel culture” might be to factor in why a specific figure is being honored. Progress being linear, most historical figures are going to have been terrible people for one reason or another, but why we choose to honor them might be relevant. There’s a law school out there named after Robert E. Lee simply because the school decided to give a slaveholding traitor a nice retirement plan.^[3] Fighting to maintain slavery is Lee’s primary accomplishment. John Marshall, like a lot of early American government figures, engaged in the mass enslavement of human beings, but is primarily known for work independent of that aspect of his life.

However, this is a problematic argument generally and it’s especially problematic when talking about a judge whose jurisprudence helped maintain the system. Just because Marbury v. Madison is more famous doesn’t mean Marshall’s actual job didn’t involve him providing legal cover for slavery for decades.

So let’s just not have schools named after Marshall. Why does this guy need a school named after him? We can and will still read his opinions and discuss his impact on American law. Whether or not his name is emblazoned on the diploma doesn’t change whether or not he’s studied for the contributions he made.

And, no offense to these schools, but do we really need to honor slaveholders just to indulge third-tier law schools seeking to bolster credibility? That sounds harsh, and these schools produce many great lawyers — including the aforementioned cabinet secretary! — but note that the University of Chicago isn’t naming itself the Roger Taney School of Law or anything.^[4] These schools only appended “John Marshall” to their names to bolster their images by hijacking the reputation of a long-dead jurist. That they did a better job of it than accidentally naming themselves ASSLaw doesn’t change that it’s all just a marketing ploy.

If the hill you want to die on is forcing Cleveland State to continue branding itself after a guy who had literally nothing to do with that school that wasn’t founded until he’d been dead over 80 years, then you really need to reassess your priorities. Because at that point you’re not fighting to defend John Marshall’s place in history, you’re fighting to defend a century-old advertising play just because you don’t like Black people objecting to slavery.

And that’s, you know, kinda racist.

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[1] Who should be Secretary of Agriculture, but I digress.

[2] One thing that confuses me is the call for “the School to not use the merger with the University of Akron School of Law as a way to avoid the issue of the School being named after a slave master.” I understand feeling like that’s a cop out from the school, but this is one of those instances where the ends justify the means. The goal is to stop honoring Marshall for years to come and if that happens through a public repudiation or through just becoming “Akron Law at Cleveland” the name is gone.

[3] If you’re thinking, “I’d heard Robert E. Lee opposed slavery and only joined the Confederacy over states’ rights” then you were duped by a pernicious myth cooked up by “Lost Cause” revisionists that infected American schools for decades.

[4] Berkeley is the rare top-flight school that had a problematic name and they ditched it already. In a shock to nobody at all, it had no impact on the quality of the school. This isn’t to say that there aren’t other issues baked into top law schools. Leland Stanford built the university and was a virulent racist. NYU’s public interest scholarship bears the name of an alum and presidential candidate who ran on ending Reconstruction. Without endorsing those names, we should at least be able to agree that dropping someone with zero connection to the school presents far fewer obstacles.

Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.