Welcome to the Lavinia Goodell State Law Library

On September 30, 2024, the Wisconsin State Law Library, located in the Risser Justice Center just off the Capitol square in Madison, Wisconsin, was named in honor of Lavinia Goodell, Wisconsin’s first woman lawyer.

As Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley noted in her remarks at the naming ceremony, Lavinia cherished libraries. In 1867, when Lavinia was living in Brooklyn, New York, her older sister, Maria Frost, was preparing to move to Janesville, Wisconsin. Maria reported to Lavinia that Janesville had no public library. Lavinia could scarcely believe this was true. She wrote:

I am filled with horror at the idea of you not having any reading in Wisconsin, and have been forming plans for the amelioration of your condition. Intellectual starvation is quite as painful as physical, tho’ it doesn’t excite the sympathies of the world so much and must not be allowed in this enlightened country, in the full blaze and glory of the Nineteenth Century. Here I am surfeited with more reading than I get time to enjoy. I have recently joined the new Brooklyn Library Association. It is splendid. There is a nice comfortable reading room, with tables, upon which you find all the principal daily and weekly papers, also thirty or forty of our best magazines, both American and Foreign, besides the New American Cyclopedia and a variety of books of every description that members can take out for two weeks. It only costs $8.00 per year, besides $1.00 initiation fee to be a member and enjoy all the privileges of the library.

Now I have been thinking that as Janesville is a growing and enterprising city it is not at all improbable that it contains such a library as this. You could join it and take out books. You can also take out magazines, and I presume papers, when they have been replaced by later ones. Magazine literature is just as good a month later as at the time. Papers are not so good a week old, but are better than nothing. You would have to tell the librarian about yourself, and ask a little special grace to take out magazines and papers, as it is not usual, but they will let you have the back ones if you manage the thing right. . . . If it does not cost more than $5.00 per year to be a member of such a library, I will pay for you. . . .

You must make inquiries the first thing when you go to Janesville and find out about it. If there is no such library there – which I can hardly think – then I will see what is the next best thing to be done. One thing is certain; my poor sister shall not starve for intellectual aliment while I am living on the fat of the land.

According to her diary entries, in the final months of her life, Lavinia made several visits to the State Law Library, which was then located in the Capitol building.

It is safe to say that Lavinia Goodell would be both proud and humbled to know that the State Law Library now bears her name. May her legacy of courage, perseverance, and justice inspire generations of Wisconsin lawyers for years to come.