A Matter of Simple Justice by Lee Stout

Author:Lee Stout [Stout, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780271059716
Publisher: The Pennsylvania State University Libraries
Published: 2012-07-06T15:22:43+00:00

Women in the Law

In a talk at Harvard in 2009, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, “It’s been an amazing century for us.… It was not that long ago that the only relevant statistic regarding women in the legal profession was zero percent—as in zero associates, zero equity partners, and zero judges.”9 Five years earlier, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recalled the story of women being denied admission to Columbia’s law school in 1890 and quoted one of the board members as saying, “No woman shall degrade herself by practicing law in New York especially if I can save her.”10 The first American women to pass bar examinations and practice law fought bitterly for these privileges in the 1870s. Most law schools at the time denied women entry. By the turn of the twentieth century, there were perhaps five hundred women lawyers in the entire country, less than 1 percent of all lawyers. These women almost always worked outside of the male-dominated legal establishment and frequently in battles for women’s rights. Into the 1950s, women still composed only 1 to 3 percent of the law profession, and many law schools still barred women from entry. In 1968, this started to change almost overnight as male law students lost their Vietnam War draft deferments and places for women quickly opened. Over the next decade, the number of women entering law school rose from 1,200 in 1967 to almost 12,000 in 1977.11 Nevertheless, acceptance and equality was slower to come.

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