History

Mary Kennedy Brown

In 1893, Mary Kennedy Brown became the Law School’s first woman graduate.

Mary E. Kennedy was born on July 19, 1864, outside tiny Troy, Vermont, near the Canadian border, one of four children of Michael Kennedy and Amanda Melvina Webber. In 1884 Mary graduated from the “classical de­partment” of St. Johnsbury Academy in Vermont. She went to Colorado to teach, and also served as the first assistant principal, at Colorado Springs High School. She soon met and, about 1888, married Dr. Frank P. Brown (1857–1889). The newlyweds lived the high life, traveling throughout the United States and Europe, until Dr. Brown died, leaving his wife a large fortune. In 1890 Mary Kennedy Brown enrolled as a special student at Wellesley College for one year to study history and English literature.

Litigation over her own business matters, and presumably her brother’s Cornell experience, led Mary in 1891 to enter Cornell Law. Despite the demanding workload, she did well in the class of sixty-two students, writing her required thesis11 and receiving her LL.B. in 1893. Through competitive orations, she was selected as one of seven university students to deliver an address at Cornell University’s graduation ceremony. The New York Tribune reported that she “captivated her audience” with her commencement address, which was titled “Portia in the Nineteenth Century.”

After graduation Mary stayed on in Ithaca for a while, teaching a SUNY course entitled Evolution and Present Condition of the Laws Affecting Women. Mary then moved to Illinois, where she was admitted to the bar in 1894. Here too she was a pioneer. Ada H. Kepley had become the first woman graduate of a law school when she graduated in 1870 from Chicago’s Union College of Law (now Northwestern), but she had been refused admission to the bar. In fact, by 1894, there were only about a dozen woman lawyers in Illinois.11 Mary practiced in Chicago for three years, with the notable firm of Collins, Goodrich, Darrow & Vincent, which had been founded in 1893 by Clarence Darrow and others and was housed in the Rookery Building. The English sculptor Harry Hems, with whom she became friends in Chicago, described her as “one of America’s most brilliant lady lawyers.”

In addition to practicing law, Mary was active in Republican women’s groups and supported woman suffrage. In 1894 she addressed several gatherings, telling them that in Colorado, where women could vote, “the results have been for the best interests of the community.” By 1896 she was a delegate to the Republican state convention. But she shared her views with Democrats too, appearing before the national committee drafting the Democratic platform, and unsuccessfully pressing a suffrage plank for women that would have approved “every form of social and political progress which will bring them better pay and larger opportunities.”

From Chicago, Mary moved to Boston and practiced law there. In 1899, she married the well-to-do Lt. Alan Wyldbore Bosworth-Smith (1870–1901), heir to an English baronetcy, at Pembroke Church in Hamilton, Bermuda. Soon the couple moved to England, and Mary became a British subject. Soon thereafter, she experienced another marital tragedy when, in a North Sea storm, Alan went down with the ship he commanded. Yet Mary was to marry again. Her third husband was Count Dumolin of Munich. Mary moved to Germany, living for several years as Countess Dumolin in Munich and Berlin before the war.

However, it seems that Mary’s third marriage did not end well, for she returned to the United States, where she lived in lower Manhattan. No longer a U.S. citizen, she could not enter the New York State bar. Instead, she took a clerical position at the American Book Company in Washington Square. She also took an occasional course in literature at Columbia University and was active in the Cornell Club of New York City.

Mary died on April 29, 1932, in her apartment on W. 17th Street. She had been ailing for about a year and had no children and lived alone. At the behest of her kindly landlady, the Cornell Club tracked down Mary’s niece in Ver­mont to make final arrangements.

Jane M.G. Foster

Her name appears on the new addition to Myron Taylor Hall, on a law school scholarship fund, and designates an endowed professorship, as well. Who was Jane M.G. Foster?

Foster graduated from the Cornell Law School in 1918, one of just two women in the class. She graduated near the top of her class and was associate editor of the Cornell Law Quarterly. However, no law firm would hire her. The only offer she received upon her graduation was a job as a legal assistant with the New York City firm of Davies, Auerbach, and Cornell. She worked at Davies Auerbach until 1929, helping to restructure companies, and developing expertise in that area.

When Foster left the firm, Cornell Law School Dean Charles Burdick contacted many others on her behalf. One response, from a prominent New York City firm, was typical: “Here in this office we have steadfastly refused to take women on our legal staff, and I know that we will continue to adhere to that policy.”

Foster had invested wisely, though; she held stock in companies such as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company–the company that was to become IBM. She continued to live in Brooklyn Heights, and focused her considerable legal and business skills on the affairs of her friends, her community, Cornell Law School, and her own growing financial interests. In the 1950s, she returned to the family home in Portsmouth, Ohio, to care for her ailing mother. She lived there until her own death in 1993.

The Foster Professorship was first held by Peter Martin, who joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 1972 and served as dean from 1980 to 1988. In a biography that appeared in an issue of the Cornell Law Review dedicated to Foster in 1995, Professor Martin wrote: “In life, she was uncomfortable with public attention, but she was proud of what she was able to do for legal education at Cornell.”

At the dedication of the Jane Foster addition to Myron Taylor Hall in 1989, then Dean Russell K. Osgood said:

“This house … built with the generosity of a careful, humble woman, to whom many opportunities were closed because of her sex … will remind us that our society, and our legal system, are not built and should not operate to confirm the powerful in their privileges, but to empower all people, to unlock the potential in the mass of us, to do something and to do it well.”

Charles Evans Hughes

Charles Evans Hughes, the man for whom Hughes Hall is named, joined the Cornell Law School faculty in 1891, when the school was just five years old, and Hughes was twenty-nine. He graduated from Brown University and went to law school at Columbia before coming to teach at Cornell. One of his first students, Myron C. Taylor, would later look back on Hughes as an early mentor.

Hughes was forced after just two years to return to private law practice in New York City in order to better support his young family – and perhaps because his father-in-law, an eminent lawyer, thought serving on the Cornell faculty was “a grave mistake.” He worried about his grandchildren being raised in a “one-horse town like Ithaca.”

In 1906, with backing from fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, Hughes defeated famed publisher William Randolph Hearst for the office of governor of New York, an office he held for two terms. He resigned as governor in 1910 to accept a position as associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, then stepped down from the court in 1916 to make a bid for the presidency. He was narrowly defeated by incumbent Woodrow Wilson.

After serving as Secretary of State from 1921 to 1925, he was nominated in 1930 by President Herbert Hoover to serve as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. When Franklin D. Roosevelt became president, Chief Justice Hughes led a fractious and controversial court in numerous confrontations between the judicial and executive branches involving much of the president’s New Deal legislation.

Known as a master of consensus-building, Hughes was a prolific and talented writer, penning twice as many opinions as any of his contemporaries on the Supreme Court. Retiring from the Court in 1941, he died in 1948. When it came time to name the Law School’s new residence center, Myron Taylor expressed his wish to honor the life and career of his former teacher.

Myron and Annabel Taylor at the dedication of Myron Taylor Hall in 1932

When Myron Charles Taylor gave Cornell $1,500,000 in 1928 for the construction of a new building for the Law School, the national media called him “the man nobody knows.” Yet he had spent ten years dominating the affairs of U.S. Steel, and another twelve as a diplomat and ambassador. When he finally retired in 1950, his was a household name.

Taylor grew up in Lyons, New York, and attended the Cornell Law School from 1893 to 1894. After struggling to establish a practice in Lyons, he first joined his brother on Wall Street; then turned his attention to the manufacture of textiles. He came to dominate the industry, building a fortune. He was contemplating retirement when, in 1927, J. P. Morgan asked him to help turn around the fortunes of U. S. Steel Corporation. Taylor first served as chairman of the corporation’s finance committee, then as chairman of the board and chief executive officer.

Taylor’s timing was impeccable; he retired U.S. Steel’s debt just before the stock market’s 1929 collapse, and was able to spend the Depression reorganizing and modernizing the company. He inaugurated a plan to divide the available work among the company’s current employees so no workers would lose their jobs. Although not a supporter of unionization or collective bargaining, Mr. Taylor shocked the country in 1937 by agreeing to unionize U.S. Steel. It was the first major industrial company in America to unionize. While other companies struggled with bloody strikes, U. S. Steel prospered.

In 1938, Taylor resigned from the corporation, hoping to enter a “sabbatical period.” Instead, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Taylor to serve as head of the American delegation to a conference in France that was trying to aid the refugees fleeing Nazi Germany, and he accepted. When the Vatican requested the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with the U.S., President Roosevelt sent Taylor. He took up his post in Rome in 1940, and was reappointed by Harry S. Truman after the war was over. Later he served on other special missions with the rank of ambassador.

Upon his death in 1959, the New York Times’ lengthy obituary ended with a straightforward observation Taylor himself would have approved: “His was, indeed, a useful life.”