100 Years Later: A Look Back at U.S. Supreme Court Justice Wiley Rutledge’s Time in Boulder
In the early 20th century, my grandparents, Wiley Blount Rutledge Jr. (1894–1949) and Annabel Person Rutledge (1888–1984), spent nine formative married years in the Rocky Mountain states—three in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and six in Boulder, Colorado. Wiley did not know it at the time, but those nine years of Rocky Mountain residence turned out to be an important qualification for his ultimate appointment as the 83rd associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. As shown below, that qualification was "geography."
Wiley earned his law degree from the University of Colorado Law School in 1922 and spent two years in private practice at a Boulder law firm, Goss, Kimbrough, and Hutchinson (now known as Hutchinson Black and Cook, LLC), before accepting a professorship at Colorado Law in 1924. Two years later, he accepted a professorship at Washington University Law School in St. Louis, later serving there as dean from 1931 to 1935. The following four years, he served as the University of Iowa Law School dean. He was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1939 and the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943, where he served until his death in 1949. Rutledge was the only Colorado Law alumnus to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Getting Started (September 1920)
Born in Kentucky, Wiley grew up in Tennessee and North Carolina, went to college in Wisconsin, taught high school in Indiana, and developed a bad case of tuberculosis in early 1916. He then returned to North Carolina, was partially cured, married his college sweetheart, and was ordered by his doctors in the summer of 1917 to “go West” for his health. His first stop was a high school teaching job in Albuquerque for three years, where he saved enough money to afford tuition at the best law school in the Rocky Mountain states.
Wiley arrived in Boulder by himself by train in early September 1920. He was 26 years old and eagerly anticipating the study of law at Colorado Law and new Rocky Mountain geography. Boulder had a population of about 11,000 and was the home of the University of Colorado. The Rutledges did not know anyone in Boulder but made friends quickly and ultimately lived in Boulder for six years. For the short term and in Annabel’s absence, Wiley rented a room in a rooming house run by a Mrs. McKenzie for $5 a week.
Wiley immediately got busy. He closed the deal on an already-contracted-for Boulder property at 1145 Grandview Ave. in Boulder’s residential University Hill neighborhood a few blocks south of downtown. Wiley wrote Annabel: “The house seems ideal to me for our purposes and I am more pleased than ever with it.” Wiley and Annabel lived in the Grandview Avenue house for a little more than three years, until fall 1923. Five years after that in 1928, the property was bought by a University of Colorado professor named Katherine Tepley, a native of Russia who, after being exiled in 1905 because of her socialist and political activities, moved to Boulder, Anglicized her name, lived in the house for over 25 years, and became a Boulder institution. Amazingly, the Grandview Avenue house still exists in much the same condition it did when the Rutledges bought it 100 years ago. A plaque on the house’s exterior honors the Rutledge and Tepley years of residence.
Just after Labor Day, Wiley started teaching part time at a prestigious high school in Boulder named Colorado State Preparatory School but popularly known as Boulder Prep. The University of Colorado started the school in 1877 to prepare students before they enrolled in the university. In 1920, Boulder Prep was located downtown at 1720 Pearl St. During the 1920–21 school year, Wiley taught commercial arithmetic, commercial law, stenography, and bookkeeping in the school’s business department. This was Wiley’s sixth semester of teaching high school business classes in his fourth high school in his third state in less than five years. Wiley also joined the First Baptist Church of Boulder, located at the corner of Spruce and 16th streets, where he received “a hearty welcome and the people seemed friendly.”
Wiley and Annabel exchanged many letters in September 1920 before Annabel arrived in Boulder. In one letter, Wiley wrote: “Can’t walk a block now without someone speaking to me . . . makes me feel like I’m in the South.”
Two Years as a Colorado Law Student (September 1920 to June 1922)
Later, in September 1920, Wiley started law school. The law school was in the middle of campus in the Guggenheim Law Building and had about 90 students, five full-time professors, an academic quarter system, and a three-year curriculum. Based on his previous three terms in 1915 at Indiana Law School, Wiley was admitted as a second-year student and thus took only two years of law studies at Colorado. Tuition was about $25 per quarter. During Wiley’s first quarter at the law school, he took only two classes, which started at 8 a.m. and then 9 a.m., to balance his job at Boulder Prep. Those classes were Code Pleading and Irrigation, a serious course on the law of Western water rights. Wiley’s professors soon recognized he was a serious and bright law student.
Wiley’s first law school quarter was very successful: He scored 97 in the Irrigation class and 90 in Code Pleading. In December 1920, Wiley bought a new suit and ties for $14.50. On Jan. 6, 1921, Wiley and Annabel splurged and spent $1 on tickets to a University of Colorado basketball game.
Wiley soon took law classes in municipal corporations and criminal law taught by Professor Herbert S. Hadley. Hadley quickly became Wiley’s favorite teacher and a role model. A progressive Republican and former governor of Missouri, Hadley joined the University of Colorado Law School faculty in 1917 partly to recover from his own tuberculosis. Wiley later wrote of Hadley:
"[I] owe more professionally to Governor Hadley than to any other person . . . . [He] had the greatest influence upon my thinking, not only in law school, but throughout the period of my education . . . . [He taught] law not merely as a science but also as an art in the process of living [and] an instrumentality for justice and social progress."
In the summer of 1921, Wiley did not teach at Boulder Prep. Instead, he took a full course load at the law school’s summer school consisting of Property II (grade 98); Constitutional Law (98); Wills (92); and Use of Law Books (1 credit, grade 95). On Aug. 31, Wiley acquired a Colorado fishing license, bought special fishing shoes, and withdrew $10.25 from the bank to fund a fishing expedition in the Colorado mountains with law school classmates, likely including Clay R. Apple. This 1921 expedition was the first of Wiley’s many Colorado mountain fishing trips, which Wiley and his friends came to call “seminars.” As a resident of Boulder, Wiley soon discovered that it was “simply impossible to escape getting out into the hills now and then.”
Wiley started his second and last law school year at CU in September 1921. In the fall quarter, he took four courses and received the following grades: Property III (95); Appellate Practice (98); Private Corporations (with Professor Hadley, 94); and Conflict of Laws (98). It is unlikely Wiley continued to teach at Boulder Prep during the 1921–22 school year. If he did not, Wiley’s high school teaching career came to an end in June 1921. Boulder Prep closed in 1937, and the old school building was soon demolished.
On Feb. 4, 1922, Wiley joined the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity. Also in February, Annabel became pregnant. During Wiley’s last law school quarter in the spring of 1922, Professor Hadley was unable to teach his class in criminal law. Wiley, as a third-year student, taught Hadley’s class to the first-year students.
In the summer of 1922, Wiley graduated from the law school along with 26 other students. His law school record included grades of 90 or above in at least 16 classes and 98 in four classes. Wiley and Annabel thought about their future and decided to stay and live in Colorado. In June 1922, Wiley took the Colorado bar exam in Denver along with 50 other people. Wiley wrote that he did not expect “high marks” because of the exam’s “tricky questions,” but he did pass.
Wiley then started his Colorado job search in earnest. This search took him to many giants in Colorado law, including James H. Pershing in Denver, William Kelley in Greeley, and Fred Sabin in La Junta. Wiley wrote that the country around Greeley was the “finest in the West. Looks like a chunk out of the heart of Indiana or Illinois flat belt transplanted. See mountains in distance.” Wiley also showed interest in teaching at Westminster Law School in Denver, which merged into the University of Denver College of Law 35 years later.
Two Years as a Colorado Lawyer (September 1922 to September 1924)
In the fall of 1922, Wiley accepted a job offer with the Boulder law firm of Goss, Kimbrough, and Hutchinson (GKH). He was 28. Founded in 1891, GKH was the best law firm in town. The firm’s third named partner, Dudley Hutchinson (a 1915 graduate of Colorado Law), was just a few years older than Wiley and soon became Wiley’s lifelong friend. In 1922, the law office occupied Suite 4 of the Willard Building at the corner of Broadway and Spruce Street. This building still exists.
Joining GKH and staying in Boulder—a town the Rutledges had come to know and like—was the most practical decision Wiley and Annabel could have made in the fall of 1922, especially as Annabel was seven months pregnant. Of the four lawyers at GKH, Wiley was the least senior and only associate. Like many new lawyers in small firms, Wiley was pressed into duty in many unfamiliar legal circumstances.
In late October 1922, Annabel’s mother came to Boulder to help with the late stage of Annabel’s pregnancy. On Nov. 5 in a Boulder hospital, Annabel delivered the Rutledges’ first child—a girl named Mary Lou in honor of Wiley’s deceased mother, Mary Lou Wigginton Rutledge.
During his first year of practice in Boulder and as a new lawyer, Wiley engaged in civic activities. In December 1922, he gave a speech to the Boulder Lions Club about the law of industrial relations. In 1923, he became involved in local politics; by mid-May, he was president of the Democratic League of Boulder. In July 1923, he organized a league dinner in Boulder featuring Josephus Daniels, a North Carolina newspaperman and nationally prominent Democrat, as guest speaker. He also arranged for Colorado U.S. Sen. Alva B. Adams to speak to the league in September. However, Wiley did not enjoy his personal involvement in organized party politics as much as his public speaking. Wiley later wrote that he was not “active politically” after 1926 when he left Colorado. Nevertheless, Wiley was always avidly interested in legal and political issues, and his reluctance about organized party politics never affected his involvement in such things as child labor law reform and FDR’s “court-packing” plan. Wiley also taught a “brotherhood” class at his Baptist church.
On March 13, 1924, Wiley and Annabel bought a property with a brand-new house at 968 8th St. at the southwest edge of Boulder’s University Hill neighborhood near their previous home. The Rutledges were the first occupants of the house, which was built in a classic bungalow style popular in Boulder at the time.
Wiley had very few, if any, criminal cases during his two years at GKH. However, he did handle two interesting criminal extradition proceedings, whose outcomes he later characterized as “the guilty man went free and the innocent one was sent back for trial.” One of these cases involved extradition of a Tennessee minister and schoolteacher who was attending summer school in Boulder and featured, Wiley later recalled, “one of my earliest mistakes in the practice of law.” Although the extradition papers were in proper order, Wiley discovered conclusive proof his client was not guilty of the charged Tennessee crime. He decided to put the extradition matter to the Colorado governor on the basis of actual innocence. However, the governor himself was temporarily absent from the state and Wiley agreed to let the Colorado attorney general hear the matter in the governor’s stead. At the hearing, the attorney general also concluded Wiley’s client was not guilty but saw the extradition papers were formally in order, and therefore ruled the Tennessee man could be extradited. Wiley wrote that his agreement was “foolish . . . [but] I was caught. I had agreed [the attorney general] should act and I did not feel that I could back out of the agreement. I have always regretted [making the agreement], for I am quite sure that if the governor had [ruled] he would not have taken the technical lawyer’s view.”
In the spring of 1924, a Colorado law school professor resigned from the faculty effective that September. The law school offered the position to Wiley, who accepted and returned to his favorite profession—teaching—but at the law school level instead of the high school level. GKH still exists as a thriving law firm in Boulder under the name Hutchinson Black and Cook, LLC, is the oldest continuously operating law firm in Colorado, and has offices at 921 Walnut St. Wiley’s friend and 1922–24 colleague Dudley Hutchinson worked at the firm for 50 years until his death in 1967.
Almost 20 years later, Wiley summed up his two-year experience at GKH as follows:
"I then considered and still regard the firm as the leading one in the community, and one of the outstanding ones of northern Colorado. The practice was largely civil, consisting principally of a general practice with emphasis upon estate work, taxation, title work, and considerable actual litigation. The firm represented 2 of the local banks and other important business interests as well as many individuals. The period was one of intense business activity in that region and we were literally flooded with business during the whole time. Consequently, I was given a volume and variety of experience which many young men don’t get in 5 or 10 years. On becoming a member of the faculty at the university in the fall of 1924, I continued to give a considerable amount of time to the firm so far as was consistent with my obligations to the university, chiefly in winding up matters upon which I had started before deciding to go into teaching. Some of these required attention during the entire period of my connection with the law school. There were a few clients who insisted upon bringing their business to me after I went to the university. These relations were so personal in character that I could not refuse to serve."
Two Years as a University of Colorado Law School Professor (September 1924 to September 1926)
In the fall of 1924, Wiley started his new job as associate professor of law at the University of Colorado. Wiley left his office at GKH on a Saturday and began teaching the following Monday. He was 30 years old and returning to the university after a two-year absence, this time as a professor, not a student. Not counting the dean, there were five professors on the law school faculty; Wiley was the least senior and the only associate professor. During the 1924–25 school year, Wiley taught many subjects, including torts, criminal law, bills and notes, damages, conflict of laws, and partnership. Later, Wiley wrote that he “taught around the curriculum” during his first year on the law school faculty.
In October 1924, Annabel became pregnant again. That fall, Wiley attended a speech given by William Jennings Bryan in a Boulder theater in support of the national Democratic ticket. In the summers of 1925 and 1926, Wiley taught both summer sessions of law school. On June 28, 1925, Annabel had her second child in Boulder, another girl, named Jean Ann (my mother). In 1925, Wiley prepared legal documents for the First Baptist Church of Boulder as it was building a large new church building at 1237 Pine St., which still exists today.
During the 1925–26 school year, Wiley continued to teach at the law school. His annual salary was $3,600. Wiley’s teaching was well received by both his faculty colleagues and students, and he began to build a good reputation. During this second year, Wiley also taught courses in public corporations and agency. Business administration, public and private corporations, and corporate governance became Wiley’s area of expertise during his law school teaching career. The Rutledge family also acquired a fox terrier named Bow-wow. In December 1925, Wiley was a member of the local Boulder committee of the Woodrow Wilson Commemoration, a national project of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. On Dec. 28, 1925, this committee held a commemorative luncheon at the Hotel Boulderado.
In April 1926, toward the end of his second year on the Colorado Law faculty, Wiley and Annabel’s lives changed forever. Herbert Hadley, Wiley’s old law school professor and then chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, reached out with a job offer. Hadley wrote Wiley that he had heard of the “very considerable success” Wiley had had as a law school teacher and suggested “if at any time you should decide that you would like to make a change, you let me know.” In August 1926, Hadley offered Wiley a job on the Washington University Law School faculty to start in September at a salary of $4,250 annually. Wiley got the Colorado law school dean’s blessing to leave on good terms, accepted Hadley’s offer, and resigned from the University of Colorado effective September 1926. On Aug. 27, Wiley gave his last University of Colorado law school exam as a full-time faculty member.
In late August 1926, the Rutledges quickly packed up their 8th Street house, put their possessions in storage for later transport to St. Louis, and prepared to leave Boulder. Much later, the 8th Street house was replaced with a handsome new house on the old Rutledge property.
On about Sept. 8, 1926, the entire Rutledge family of five—Wiley, Annabel, 2-year-old Mary Lou, 1-year-old Jean Ann, and Bow-wow the dog—boarded a train in Boulder and left Colorado heading east. This departure was almost nine years to the day after Wiley’s lonely and virtually penniless September 1917 arrival in Albuquerque and six years to the day after Wiley’s September 1920 arrival in Boulder. Early in the morning of Sept. 10, 1926, Wiley arrived at the St. Louis train station to start his new job at Washington University and begin a new life outside the Rocky Mountain region.
After Wiley and Annabel left Boulder in September 1926, they never again returned to live permanently in any part of the Rocky Mountain region. Although they visited Albuquerque once or twice after 1926 and remembered friendships made there, they returned to Boulder for lengthy temporary stays again and again. Indeed, the Rutledges loved Boulder. They spent many summers at the Boulder Chautauqua in the 1930s and 1940s; Wiley taught many summer school quarters at the University of Colorado Law School between 1927 and 1942; and everyone in the family loved to fish in the Colorado mountains. Wiley once wrote about Boulder:
"There is something about living in an environment which is small enough to become acquainted with which makes one feel at home, and therefore comfortable and relaxed. And I know too from Colorado days that the daily vision of the skyline and the reach of space brings one into closer kinship with the entire physical universe. . . . I doubt whether anything will ever quite take the place of the skyline running north along the Continental Divide from Boulder toward Laramie."
Wiley’s ties to Boulder were so close he once represented 12-year-old Boulder native and future prominent Boulder County attorney Neil King (’56) in Neil’s father’s (former Colorado Law Dean Edward C. King) absence when Boulder police temporarily detained Neil in 1945 for allegedly throwing green apples at a city bus. Wiley’s 1945 defense of the leader of the “green apple gang” was later praised by the Boulder County Bar Association as follows: “We know of no other case where a sitting Supreme Court Justice acted so directly to protect the civil liberties of an errant juvenile.”
When FDR appointed Wiley to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943, he quipped that one of Wiley’s prime qualifications was “geography.” However, the nine years Wiley and Annabel spent in the Rocky Mountain states from 1917 to 1926 did more than add to Wiley’s geography; they shaped Wiley’s legal career.
Wiley and Annabel are buried in Boulder’s Green Mountain Cemetery.
For further reading: Salt of the Earth, Conscience of the Court: The Story of Justice Wiley Rutledge by John M. Ferren