Court Opinion

ID: 9519942
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 01:28:05.914972+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:45:21.887605
License: Public Domain

DAY, J.
(Dissenting). I dissent. I would grant the petition to discontinue compulsory membership in the State Bar of Wisconsin. I feel that the best interests of this Court, the members of the legal profession and the people of this state would be better served if membership was voluntary. The association would then depend for support on the attractiveness of its programs to its members instead of depending on the assessment of compulsory dues.
Up until the time this Court decided to “integrate” the bar1 and require payment of dues to a Court sponsored bar association, the Court’s role vis-a-vis the “bar” was to each lawyer as an individual, not as a collective mass known as a “bar association.” The Court’s role was its time honored one of determining who would be admitted to practice before the courts and setting a code of conduct, the infraction of which could result in discipline including disbarment. “Admission to the bar” or permission to hold oneself out as a lawyer and represent clients in the courts of this state, was by examination or graduation from the University of Wisconsin or Marquette University law schools or admission on foreign license in accordance with rules laid down by this Court. The purpose was to assure the people of this state that those who held themselves out as lawyers were *389competent. Competence was assumed to continue once admitted to practice. Violation of the Code of Ethics was grounds to take away the privilege of practicing or the imposition of lesser sanctions. The purpose was to protect the public from those who fall short of that standard of conduct expected of those society entrusts with representation of clients, whether individual, corporate or public, in the civil and criminal courts of this state.
Changing needs and different insights have changed the form hut not the role of this Court toward the individual lawyer. We now require the continuation of legal education and proof each year of having taken certain prescribed credits of continuing legal education to help insure continuing competence of those whom we have licensed to practice law. Codes of Ethics have changed and we have implemented the means of processing complaints of ethical violation by lawyers and sought the more expeditious handling of cases requiring discipline by this Court.
This is the time honored and essential ongoing relationship between this Court and the lawyers who are also called officers of this Court. The public rightly expects us to devote our best efforts to insure, as nearly as possible, that those who represent clients in the courts of this state are competent and ethical.
We have set up two Boards directly under us to try and assure these results. The first is the Board of Professional Responsibility to try and assure compliance with the Code of Ethics. The second is the Board of Professional Competence, which is our means of providing for the orderly admission to practice of those seeking admittance and supervising continuing legal education.
Both boards are part of the Court’s administrative system to carry out our responsibility for admission to practice and discipline. These boards operate separately from the integrated bar except that we utilize the mail*390ing- and billing machinery of the State Bar to collect our assessment from the lawyers to finance the work of these boards.
These functions do not require that in addition we try and supervise an association performing the myriad tasks and services that professional societies perform for their members and services they undertake for the benefit of the public at large or segments of the public.
It has been my observation in five and one-half years on this Court that we more frequently react2 to bar association action rather than act to initiate specific programs and policies for the bar to carry out. I do not say this in criticism. This Court does not have the time nor the staff to supervise, manage, set up budgets and do the many day-to-day jobs that a professional society may or should undertake. But if we really are to “run” the association, then it seems to me the public has a right to expect us to actively govern the association;3 to *391decide what services should be provided to members, to determine what the dues should be and how much of the budget should go for scholarships for disadvantaged law students, how much should go for making legal services available to those under represented, how much should go to seeking legislation to help make the legal system function more responsively to the needs and wishes of various groups. Do we have enough programs for lawyers who are house counsel to corporations and associations and do not engage in private practice? Do we do enough for the large number of attorneys working full time for government agencies or in law enforcement or as public defenders ? In my opinion, all of these are very proper concerns. What to do about them, however, is a matter that can bring forth a wide range and variety of opinion.
These are proper concerns for the Bar Association but it is the lawyer members who should debate and decide these questions; not this Court.
An association will be successful if it serves its members. It is the market place that should determine membership and dues, not forced membership as a requirement to practice law.
At the hearing on this matter and in materials submitted to us we were advised of successful voluntary associations in neighboring states with memberships in excess of ninety percent of lawyers admitted to practice.
I find it very significant that a large majority of the lawyers in this state who answered the questionnaire submitted to them by the petitioners4 were opposed to continue compulsory membership. This issue will continue to be an unnecessary source of irritation by large numbers of attorneys who favor a voluntary rather than a compulsory membership policy.
*392It is for these reasons that I would grant the prayer of the petitioners.
I am authorized to state that Justice William Callow joins in this dissent.

 The bar was integrated on a “trial basis” by Supreme Court order in 1956 and continued in effect on a permanent basis by order of this Court entered December 22, 1958. See, Lathrop v. Donohue, 10 Wis.2d 230, 102 N.W.2d 404 (1960).

 An example is the questioning by the majority of the relationship between the “voluntary” political arm of the Bar and the Board of Governors of the State Bar.

 This Court previously recognized this requirement when it said in In re Integration of Bar, 249 Wis. 523, 528, 529 (1946):
“It appears to be assumed . . . that the court will fully exhaust its function by setting up the organization and requiring dues to he paid and that from there on the court will leave the organized bar to operate in a completely democratic and voluntary manner, dealing with such problems as in the opinion of the bar are proper for them to consider and to solve, and expending its moneys for these democratically ascertained purposes.
“Nothing is further from the truth in our opinion. It appears to us that the same considerations that may call for the court to exercise power initially to integrate, require it to censor the budgets and activities of the bar after integration. . . . the price of integration would be much greater than this court or any lawyer ought to he willing to pay, unless the exigencies in respect to standards of admission and discipline are so great as to warrant adoption of some such expedient, either temporarily or upon a limited scale.”
These functions of admission and discipline are now under this Court.

 2,820 opposed to integration; 1,892 in favor of continued integration.