SBM Blog

Meet The Amazing Author Of American Public Defense

Born July 16, 1849.  A seriously amazing human being.  For starters, read her Wikipedia bio.  A sample:

At the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, during a "congress" of the Board of Lady Managers, Foltz introduced her idea of the public defender, with a speech entitled "Rights of Persons Accused of Crime — Abuses Now Existing." Foltz's then-radical concept of providing assistance to indigent criminal defendants is used today throughout the United States. She also created
a similar model for the California Parole System.

For more, read Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz and June 29, 1915: Pioneer Prosecutor Predicts Public Defense.

The Portia Hypothesis: Do Women Lawyers With Masculine Names Have More Success?

Yes. According to this working paper, voters in South Carolina preferred "nominally masculine" females over other female candidates. The researchers labelled their work a test of the "Portia Hypothesis, and based their correlation of names to success on the "joint empirical distribution of names and gender in the state’s entire population of registered voters." (Huh?)

To think that we in Michigan thought it all boiled down to an Irish last name.

For what might really going on, check out the New Yorker blog post, "The Surprising Psychology of How Names Shape Our Thoughts." A teaser:

Even the names people choose for their children vary from simple to complex, and that decision determines some of their outcomes later in life. With the psychologists Simon Laham and Peter Koval, I found that people prefer politicians with simpler names—and lawyers in American firms with fluent names rise up the legal hierarchy to partnership more quickly than their non-fluently named colleagues. (The result persisted even when we focussed on Anglo-American names, so it doesn’t simply boil down to xenophobic prejudice.)

Art: Portia and Shylock, Thomas Sully, 1835

 

Having It All -- A Letter To Harvard

In 1961 Phyllis Richman got this letter when she applied to a graduate program in city planning. The Washington Post publishes the answer she wrote 52 years later.

Hats Off To Martha Griffiths On 50th Anniversary of Equal Pay Act

Last week the nation celebrated State Bar of Michigan member John Dingell for becoming the longest serving member of Congress in history (57 years and 177 days, to be exact). Dingell told numerous interviewers that his proudest moment in those 57 years was his vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The same Congress 50 years ago today passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and it was another Michigan lawyer and member of Congress who led the way -- Martha Griffiths.  She can be seen second from the right at the bill signing.

Congratulations, Girls! Women Sweep Top Spots On All Michigan Law Journals

The University of Michigan Law School will experience a first in the fall -- all of the editors-in-chief of all of the student-led law journals, as well as the majority of the managing editors, will be women. This sweep is all the more notable given that there is not quite gender parity in the student body. Of the 1040 J.D. candidates, 570 are men (54.9%) and 470 are women (45.1%).

The editors-in-chief of the six student led law journals are Dayna Zolle, Michigan Law Review, Emma Cox, Michigan Journal of Law Reform, Julia Stuebing, Michigan Journal of International Law, Greer Donley and Gina Myers-Schulz, Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, Emily Gilman, Michigan Journal of Race and Law, and Sarah Cork, Michigan Telecommunications and Technology Law Review (MTTLR). In addition, Michigan also has two provisional law journals, the Michigan Journal of Environmental and Administrative Law and the Michigan Journal of Private Equity and Venture Capital Law, whose editors-in-chief are Jamen Tyler and Rachel Shapiro, respectively. 

As they might have said in the nineteen-sixties, "Congratulations, girls!"  When Sally Katzen was chosen as the editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Journal in 1966, it was national news.  The New York Times ran this story:

Sally Katzen, 23 years old, became the first girl to be elected editor in chief of the 65-year-old Michigan Law Review. The Review is a scholarly journal frequently cited in litigants’ briefs and court decisions, and ranks among the top such publications in the United States. “I’ve been told the job will take about 60 hours a week – but I hope I won’t have to give up my social life,” Miss Katzen, a native of Pittsburgh, said after her election.” 

Her local paper chimed in:

Local Lawyer Lass to Edit Michigan Law Review Sally Katzen, University of Michigan Law School student, was elected editor-in-chief of the Michigan Law Review for 1966-67, the first girl to be so honored since the scholarly journal began publication here in 1902.

Sally Katzen has gone on to a most distinguished legal career and to inspire and entertain untold numbers of women (this blogger among them) with first-hand accounts of sexism and counter-sexism strategies.

Ms. Bader Ginsburg Conducts A Clinic On Persuasive Advocacy

Jeffrey Toobin's admiring profile of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in The New Yorker (sub. req.) asserts that she is the Court's most accomplished litigator.  Sure, he says, Chief Justice John Roberts argued more cases before the Court but "most of them were of modest significance." Whatever.

What will resonate in the Toobin piece for those of us women who lived through the heyday of the "women's movement" (that is what it was called, right?) is this passage:

There is some irony in Ginsburg’s reputation for reserve, because she is, by far, the current Court’s most accomplished litigator. Before Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., became a judge, he argued more cases than Ginsburg did before the Justices, but most of them were disputes of modest significance. Ginsburg, during the nineteen-seventies, argued several of the most important women’s-rights cases in the Court’s history. Her halting style in private never prevented her from vigorous advocacy before the bench. In those days, Ginsburg was a pioneer. When, as a forty-three-year-old Columbia Law School professor, she made a full argument before the Supreme Court, in 1976, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger stumbled when introducing her. “Mrs. Bader? Mrs. Ginsburg?” he said. (Female advocates, to say nothing of those with multi-part names, were a rarity in those days.) Later in the same case, Justice Potter Stewart made a similar mistake, calling her “Mrs. Bader.”

On one occasion, when she brought some female students to the courtroom with her, they urged her to insist that the Justices address her with the novel honorific Ms. “I decided not to make a fuss about it,” Ginsburg told me. “That wasn’t the reason I was there.”

She won.

Male Bastion UK Supreme Court Under Pressure?

From The Guardian's "Supreme court denies government pressure to select a woman":

Lady Hale is currently the only woman on the 12-person court. Asked about judicial diversity on Wednesday, Lord Neuberger, president of the supreme court, told members of the House of Lords constitution committee that recruitment to the judiciary was mainly from the bar, which was "very white, public-school, upper middle-class male". He suggested encouraging individual women to seek promotion and supported the idea of appointing academic lawyers and part-time judges at all levels.

Some Welcome Words On Having It All

The important and urgent debate about worklife balance and whether it is possible for women to "have it all" (just women?), inflamed most recently by super-achiever lawyer Anne Marie Slaughter's "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" at The Atlantic, has been going on for so long now that the discourse has become deeply rutted in cliche, and enervating. But these two comments on The Dish strike me as both fresh and hopeful:

• The focus should not be on adding roles for individual women, but on the family.  Each traditional American family has a breadwinner, a caregiver and the cared for.  If we treat each of these as part-time roles then there can be splits that allow everyone to fulfill part of each role - not based on gender or age, but on ability then we can have balance. But if we look to see if any one person in the family can have 100 percent of each of these roles, the answer has to be no. A truly spectacular person might be able to be a complete breadwinner and a complete caregiver - the '80s feminist ideal of "having it all" - but then they don't get the caring for that they need to be whole and the family suffers. But if each parent takes on 50 percent of each role and even the kids take on some (necessary to train them to be loving, successful people) then the family can truly have it all.
• I am a trial lawyer and mother of three, in my 30s, married to my law partner, who splits both duties with me right down the middle.  I’m just ready for everyone to get post-feminist and acknowledge fundamental truth that no one can do everything perfectly all at once, but that doesn’t make it a zero-sum game.

I have both a fulfilling career and family life, and so does my husband. I made choices in my career that allowed me to be with my children as much as possible while still having a demanding career that is deeply fulfilling. I chose to be paid on a contingency-fee basis instead of hourly, so the clock didn’t rule my finances. I chose a suburban office near my home and the kids’ school instead of in downtown high rise so I could pop in for school parties and pick them up daily.  

What I "give up" is similar to what Anne-Marie Slaughter gave up when she left the White House to go back to being a law professor. I’m not running for elected office or State Bar President. I have given up traveling on a weekly basis or doubling my caseload. In short, I have given up taking over the world for the time being to raise my family.

Yes, that’s something of a "sacrifice," just as Slaughter had to "sacrifice" a plum White House job for a still-fantastic, though less glamorous legal career as a law professor. But that’s just being an adult and juggling multiple responsibilities; it’s not anyone’s fault. I’m not sure any of us should even feel disappointed about this state of affairs.

It’s easy to forget that during the height of the feminist movement in the '60s and '70s, women rarely went to law school and had a hard time finding employment when they did.  If the '80s "overpromised" anything, maybe that overreach was a necessary part of the growth curve for society just to get women in the professional world. Now it’s time for everyone to be a grownup, make rational choices about what your priorities are in life, and stop whining. Maybe we need to redefine "having it all" to be something other than a childish dream of running the world and still making it home in time for cookies and afternoon cartoons, and embrace what it means to "have it all" as an adult.

I’m building a powerful, successful career and a deeply fulfilling home life.  If that isn’t having it all, I don’t know what is.

Law Schools Look To A Future Without Affirmative Action

The National Law Journal has a special report, "Race's Role. Law schools brace for 'Fisher' ruling," speculating on a ruling in Fisher v. University of Texas," with special attention to the University of Michigan Law School:

Minority enrollment at Michigan declined by about 50 percent after the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, which bans preferential treatment for minorities in college admissions, passed in 2006, said senior assistant dean for admission, financial aid and career planning Sarah Zearfoss. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit overturned that initiative on November 15 on equal-protection ground, but it had remained in effect pending that ruling.)

Zearfoss joined Michigan's admissions office in 2001, just before a federal trial judge struck down the affirmative-action plan during the early skirmishing in Grutter. The intervening years until the Supreme Court's ruling were a blur of discussions in which law school admissions officers contemplated the future, she said. "I haven't seen as much activity this time around. It seems like there is a lot of room for the Supreme Court to make a lot of different decisions, which is why people might not be trying to get out in front of a negative decision."

Zearfoss worries that a national affirmative-action ban at the undergraduate level would narrow the pipeline of minorities who even consider going to law school. About 80 percent of the law school's applicants come from outside the state, where most universities and colleges do take race into account. "If you don't have the pool to begin with, the whole problem just gets exacerbated," she said.

Class Action Gender Discrimination Lawsuit Against BigLaw Firm: "Boys Club" Hogs Credit And Contacts

ABA Journal reports that a former partner is the lead plaintiff in a $200 million class action lawsuit filed on Monday against Greenberg Traurig (GT) claiming that the firm's women lawyers are discriminated against by a “boys club” that hogs origination credit, excludes women from client pitches, and favors men in work assignments. There is an exception to this state of affairs, the suit claims, but it makes matters even worse:

GT prioritizes, pays and promotes women who have intimate relationships with firm leaders or who acquiesce to sexualized stereotypes.

Here's the lawsuit (PDF).