Law Practice and Appointment To The Wisconsin Public Service Commission
With a strong recommendation from Frankfurter, Lilienthal entered the practice of law in Chicago with Donald Richberg in 1923. Prominent in labor law, Richberg gave Lilienthal a major role in writing his firm's brief for the appellants in Michaelson v. United States, 266 U.S. 42 (1924), a landmark case in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of striking railroad workers to jury trials on criminal contempt charges. Richberg also assigned Lilienthal to write major parts of what became the Railway Labor Act of 1926. In 1925, Lilienthal assisted criminal defense lawyers Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays in their successful defense of Dr. Ossian Sweet, an African American physician put on trial in Detroit for killing a white man who was part of a mob that attacked Sweet's home. Lilienthal reported on the case in an article he wrote for The Nation.
| Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Smith v. Illinois Bell Telephone |
Lilienthal left Richberg's firm in 1926 to concentrate on public utility law, He was one of the lawyers for the city of Chicago in the case of Smith v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co., 282 U.S. 133 (1930), in which a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court resulted in a refund of $20,000,000 to telephone customers who had been overcharged. From 1926 to 1931, Lilienthal also edited a legal information service on public utilities for Commerce Clearing House. In 1931, Wisconsin's reform-minded Republican governor, Philip La Follette, asked him to become a member of the state's reorganized Public Service Commission.
| Wikisource has original text related to this article: PSC of Wisconsin v. Wisconsin Telephone Co. |
As the commission's leading member, Lilienthal expanded its staff and launched aggressive investigations of Wisconsin's gas, electric and telephone utilities. By September 1932, the commission achieved rate reductions totaling more than $3 million affecting over a half-million customers; but an ambitious attempt to force a one-year 12.5 percent rate cut on the Wisconsin Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T, was quashed by the Wisconsin courts. After La Follette's defeat in the 1932 Republican primary election, Lilienthal began putting out feelers for a federal appointment in the new Democratic administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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