Howard B. Eisenberg, 55, the Marquette University Law School dean who emerged on the national stage two weeks ago because of his role on the panel investigating claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in the Milwaukee Archdiocese, died of complications from a heart attack in Milwaukee’s St. Luke’s Medical Center Tuesday, June 4.
While most Americans saw Mr. Eisenberg solely in his role on the church-appointed commission, Wisconsin’s legal community remembered him Wednesday as a peerless legal educator, an attorney whose career was held up to law students as a model of ethical behavior.
“He was a terrific lawyer. I thought he was a marvelous dean. I thought he was a role model for his students and for the entire bar,” said Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson. “When I give speeches to law students, I use him as an example of what a good lawyer is…a great believer in and practitioner of giving back to the community. He spent an enormous amount of time representing people who couldn’t otherwise have afforded representation.”
Mr. Eisenberg took pride in these cases, said Donald Hands, an Episcopal priest and psychologist who served with him on the archdiocesan sexual abuse panel. Once Wisconsin’s chief public defender, Mr. Eisenberg frequently took pro bono cases.
“He said that he was the best lawyer that money can’t buy,” Hands said. “He really believed that the law was there to help society to do what was right.”
Mr. Eisenberg, who had been appointed to the sexual abuse panel by then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, had quietly led it since April. He was its chairman when it recommended a “zero tolerance” policy for priests involved in sex abuse and when Weakland resigned after admitting he had reached a secret, $450,000 settlement in 1998 with a man who had accused him of sexual assault.
The day Weakland made the settlement public–May 23–was the same day Mr. Eisenberg suffered the first of at least two heart attacks that eventually led to his death.
Angry and shaken, he had told the Tribune earlier in the day that Weakland’s resignation called into question the authority under which the five-member commission had been looking into the Milwaukee abuse allegations.
“There’s no way you can react positively to this. It’s shocking,” he said. “You keep waiting for the other shoe–the other sandbag–to drop. I feel like it just dropped on my head.”
Mr. Eisenberg grew up in the Austin neighborhood in Chicago, graduated from Northwestern University and earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Abrahamson was one of his professors.
After law school he clerked for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Horace Wilkie, the beginning of what colleagues would later describe as Mr. Eisenberg’s encyclopedic memory of case law.
“Howard not only had an answer but quoted…case and a citation from memory,” said Gerald Mowris, president of the Wisconsin State Bar Association. “He was always willing to provide advice and guidance or suggestions to young lawyers.”
From 1972 to 1978, he served as chief state public defender and wrote the Wisconsin public defender statute. He was selected in 1978 as executive director of the National Aid and Defender Association in Washington, D.C., and taught at Southern Illinois University School of Law in Carbondale from 1983 to 1991.
A dean and professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law until 1994, Mr. Eisenberg had been dean of the Marquette School of Law since 1995.
“He was reasonable and unflappable,” said Marquette legal professor Peter Rofes. “He understood about dealing with prima donnas. Howard was gifted at dealing with the idiosyncrasies of academics.”
Among the pro bono cases Mr. Eisenberg took was representing inmates who decried incarceration in the Boscobel, Wis., super-maximum security prison as cruel and unusual punishment. After Mr. Eisenberg joined the case, the state settled out of court.
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He argued other cases before federal appellate courts as a court-appointed attorney. One friend joked he was even a fan of the Chicago Cubs. “People who didn’t get the best rolls of the dice in their lives, those are the people he wanted to help,” Rofes said.
At the same time, Mr. Eisenberg served on the state commission that recommends finalists for U.S. attorney posts and federal judgeships in Wisconsin, and he was recently appointed by Gov. Scott McCallum to co-chair the state’s new government ethics reform task force.
“He got all these various appointments because people just knew he would work hard, use his best judgment and that he would have compassion for all these people,” Abrahamson said. “He was Howard Eisenberg. That was it.”
Mr. Eisenberg’s survivors include his wife, Phyllis; daughter, Leah; two sons, Nathan and Adam; his parents, Dr. Herman and Marge; and a brother, Dr. Jerry.
A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday in the Temple Menorah, 9363 N. 76th St., Milwaukee.