My Chicago Law Moment: Three Members of the Class of '65 Reflect on the Bigelow Program

Janice C. Griffith, Judith A. Lonnquist, and Gail P. Fels

My Chicago Law Moment is a series highlighting the Law School ideas, experiences, and approaches that have impacted our students and alumni. Video produced by Will Anderson.

When Janice C. Griffith, Judith A. Lonnquist, and Gail P. Fels, all ’65, graduated from the Law School, they had learned to think like lawyers. But perhaps even more notably, they had learned to write like lawyers—clearly and critically.

“That was probably the thing that helped me the most—the Bigelow Fellows,” said Griffith, a law professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.

As the three women gathered at last year’s Reunion, they reflected on the impact of the writing program, which has been taught by Harry A. Bigelow Teaching Fellows since the program was established in 1947.

 “Among other things, I learned to write a brief so that it sounded impartial and the judge could lift great sections of my appellate briefs in their opinions,” said Fels, a retired commercial litigator from Florida. “And, where I worked, if you tried a case, you did all the appeals work as well. So I did a lot of appeals over the years. And I never lost an appeal, except one, in a 35-year career. I put it all down to the writing program. It was wonderful. Every two weeks we had to do a paper, and we all had to sit around and talk about it.”

The ability to think critically went with that, and Lonnquist, a Seattle lawyer, remembers the moment that she first realized that she had begun thinking like a lawyer. It was an “aha moment” as she was sitting in Professor Harry Kalven, Jr.’s Elements of the Law class.

“It was a paradigm shift in my thinking. I equated it to learning geometry – you know how you learn the steps to be logical? It was like that – it dawned on me … that I was thinking like a lawyer. I was thinking logically,” she said. “I equate the law to a snowball – it starts little and picks up things as it rolls down the hill.”

Added Griffith: “When I started to practice law, I was totally amazed that I could out-think these people who had been practicing for many years.”

These skills, however, didn’t come easily.

“For me the first year of law school was like trying to study calculus in Chinese,” Fels said. “We’d all been very good students at very good schools, and it was quite a humbling experience. I think we really did learn critical thinking and critical writing here. And that’s served us all very well.”