Female Lawyer Quotes

As if I didn’t know that already. A courtroom isn’t much different. Female lawyers are always on trial in more ways than one. We have to play by different rules.

It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an obsession. And for those who have been socialized female, that pressure is relentless. So decomposition becomes a radical act. It’s a way to say, ‘I love and accept myself.

Girls don't go to law school," I told him. "No, but women do.

One day I made note of a New York Times article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among American lawyers—most especially female ones. “How depressing,” I wrote in my journal.

Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased. An individualist solution might be to tell women to interrupt right back74 – perhaps working on their ‘polite interrupting’75 skills. But there’s a problem with this apparently gender-neutral approach, which is that it isn’t gender-neutral in effect: interrupting simply isn’t viewed the same way when women do it. In June 2017 US Senator Kamala Harris was asking an evasive Attorney General Jeff Sessions some tough questions. When he prevaricated once too often, she interrupted him and pressed him to answer. She was then in turn (on two separate occasions) interrupted and admonished by Senator John McCain for her questioning style.76 He did not do the same to her colleague Senator Rob Wyden, who subjected Sessions to similarly dogged questioning, and it was only Harris who was later dubbed ‘hysterical’.

In all developed countries, without exception, women spend fewer hours working. In the United States, female doctors work fewer hours than their male counterparts; the same is true for female lawyers.[403]

The witch-burnings did not take place during the “Dark Ages,” as we commonly suppose. They occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries– precisely during and following the Renaissance, that glorious period when, as we are taught, “men’s” minds were being freed from bleakness and superstition. While Michelangelo was sculpting and Shakespeare writing, the witches were burning. The whole secular “Enlightenment,” in fact, the male professions of doctor, lawyer, judge, artist, all rose from the ashes of the destroyed women’s culture. Renaissance men were celebrating naked female beauty in their art, while women’s bodies were being tortured and burned by the hundreds of thousands all around them.

There was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions or that some of them did not deserve the punishments they received. There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

In The Enemy Within, Bobby Kennedy asserted that after the trial, Joe Louis, who was out of work and deeply in debt at the time, was immediately given a well-paying job with a record company that got a $2 million Teamsters pension fund loan. Joe Louis then married the female black lawyer from California whom he had met at the trial. When Bobby Kennedy’s right-hand and chief investigator, the future author Walter Sheridan, tried to interview Joe Louis for the McClellan Committee about the record company job, the ex-champ refused to cooperate and said about Bobby Kennedy: “Tell him to go take a jump off the Empire State Building.” Still, Bobby Kennedy expected to have the last laugh by the end of 1957. Hoffa

I wasn’t built to practice law. One day I made note of a New York Times article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among American lawyers—most especially female ones. “How depressing,” I wrote in my journal.

The jury was composed of eight blacks and four whites. Hoffa and his attorney, the legendary Edward Bennett Williams, struck only white jurors in the selection process. Hoffa had a black female lawyer flown in from California to sit at counsel table. He arranged for a newspaper, The Afro-American, to run an ad praising Hoffa as a champion of the “Negro race.” The ad featured a photo of Hoffa’s black-and-white legal team. Hoffa then had the newspaper delivered to the home of each black juror. Finally, Hoffa’s Chicago underworld buddy Red Dorfman had the legendary boxing champion Joe Louis flown in from his Detroit home. Jimmy Hoffa and Joe Louis hugged in front of the jury as if they were old friends. Joe Louis stayed and watched a couple of days of testimony. When Cye Cheasty testified, Edward Bennett Williams asked him if he had ever officially investigated the NAACP. Cheasty denied he had, but the seed was planted. Hoffa was acquitted. Edward

The diaries also revealed a deeply sensitive, intelligent woman, one who had hoped to start a college for Hawaiian women, affording them the 'same education as men.' She had planned to open a bank for women, enabling them to handle their own financial affairs. She recognized the need for more female lawyers and physicians, the need for women's rights over their bodies, and their destinies. And lastly, though she had a fondness for men, she felt women 'basically didn't need them.

One of my greatest fears is family decline.There’s an old Chinese saying that “prosperity can never last for three generations.” I’ll bet that if someone with empirical skills conducted a longitudinal survey about intergenerational performance, they’d find a remarkably common pattern among Chinese immigrants fortunate enough to have come to the United States as graduate students or skilled workers over the last fifty years. The pattern would go something like this: • The immigrant generation (like my parents) is the hardest-working. Many will have started off in the United States almost penniless, but they will work nonstop until they become successful engineers, scientists, doctors, academics, or businesspeople. As parents, they will be extremely strict and rabidly thrifty. (“Don’t throw out those leftovers! Why are you using so much dishwasher liquid?You don’t need a beauty salon—I can cut your hair even nicer.”) They will invest in real estate. They will not drink much. Everything they do and earn will go toward their children’s education and future. • The next generation (mine), the first to be born in America, will typically be high-achieving. They will usually play the piano and/or violin.They will attend an Ivy League or Top Ten university. They will tend to be professionals—lawyers, doctors, bankers, television anchors—and surpass their parents in income, but that’s partly because they started off with more money and because their parents invested so much in them. They will be less frugal than their parents. They will enjoy cocktails. If they are female, they will often marry a white person. Whether male or female, they will not be as strict with their children as their parents were with them. • The next generation (Sophia and Lulu’s) is the one I spend nights lying awake worrying about. Because of the hard work of their parents and grandparents, this generation will be born into the great comforts of the upper middle class. Even as children they will own many hardcover books (an almost criminal luxury from the point of view of immigrant parents). They will have wealthy friends who get paid for B-pluses.They may or may not attend private schools, but in either case they will expect expensive, brand-name clothes. Finally and most problematically, they will feel that they have individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and therefore be much more likely to disobey their parents and ignore career advice. In short, all factors point to this generation

The better I understood my education, the angrier I became that most working-class and poor people are denied one. Why are the children of doctors, lawyers, and engineers taught the mysteries of existence while the children of janitors and waitresses are taught fear? I developed a preoccupation with my own inadequacies, aided by a few professors of elitism. To combat my growing anxiety, I began to envision myself a class spy. I would soak up all of the information they could give me and run reconnaissance for my team.

You need to understand it from me: if I have a female lawyer in front of me - it doesn't matter how much she has achieved - and next to her is a mother of five, six, or seven children, and they are in great health and well-educated by her, then I want to say: from the eternal point of view of the eternal value of our people, the woman who is able to have children and has children and raised them, and thereby gave our people the further ability to live in the future - has achieved more. She has done more. She assists us to avoid the death of our people.

For example, consider the following from Diane, one of a few female lawers in a large law practice: One late afternoon I was up on the 7th floor of our building, and I walked by a room that is usually locked, but the door was open a bit and I could hear people laughing and joking behind it. When I opened the door, I saw several of the other lawyers, all male, sitting around, drinking alcohol, and having a great time. I walked in and said, “What is this room? I didn’t even know it was here.” One of the male lawyers said with a smirk on his face, “Oh, that’s because only the kings have keys.” In this law firm, a boy’s club was alive and well.

Margaret Fuller, the leading antebellum female intellectual, even went so far as to suggest that the anti-slavery party ought to plead for women’s rights, too—because, like slaves, women were kept in bondage by civil law, custom, and patriarchal abuse.68 It was an emboldening insight. Elizabeth Cady, daughter of a prominent New York lawyer, had had fantasies when she was eleven years old of leading a life of scholarship and self-reliance.

The important parts of my story, I was realizing, lay less in the surface value of my accomplishments and more in what undergirded them—the many small ways I’d been buttressed over the years, and the people who’d helped build my confidence over time. I remembered them all, every person who’d ever waved me forward, doing his or her best to inoculate me against the slights and indignities I was certain to encounter in the places I was headed—all those environments built primarily for and by people who were neither black nor female. I thought of my great-aunt Robbie and her exacting piano standards, how she’d taught me to lift my chin and play my heart out on a baby grand even if all I’d ever known was an upright with broken keys. I thought of my father, who showed me how to box and throw a football, same as Craig. There were Mr. Martinez and Mr. Bennett, my teachers at Bryn Mawr, who never dismissed my opinions. There was my mom, my staunchest support, whose vigilance had saved me from languishing in a dreary second-grade classroom. At Princeton, I’d had Czerny Brasuell, who encouraged me and fed my intellect in new ways. And as a young professional, I’d had, among others, Susan Sher and Valerie Jarrett—still good friends and colleagues many years later—who showed me what it looked like to be a working mother and consistently opened doors for me, certain I had something to offer. These were people who mostly didn’t know one another and would never have occasion to meet, many of whom I’d fallen out of touch with myself. But for me, they formed a meaningful constellation. These were my boosters, my believers, my own personal gospel choir, singing, Yes, kid, you got this! all the way through. I’d never forgotten it. I’d tried, even as a junior lawyer, to pay it forward, encouraging curiosity when I saw it, drawing younger people into important conversations.

Sometimes reparations is used to justify a feeding frenzy in which minority claimants simply raid the U.S. Treasury en masse while government bureaucrats facilitate a large transfer of wealth from the taxpayer to these so-called historical victims. A scandalous example of this is the Pigford case. Some ninety-one black farmers had sued the U.S. government alleging a legacy of bias against African Americans. Rather than settle the suit and pay the farmers a reasonable compensation, the Obama administration used the lawsuit to make an absurdly expensive settlement. It agreed to pay out $1.33 billion to compensate not only the ninety-one plaintiffs but also thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court. Encouraged by this largesse, law firms began to conjure up new claimants. Later reviews showed that some of these claimants were nursery-school-age children and even urban dwellers who had no connection to farming. In some towns, the number of people being paid was many times greater than the total number of farms. According to the New York Times, one family in Little Rock, Arkansas, had ten members each submit a claim for $50,000, netting $500,000 for the family without any proof of discrimination. Then the Native Americans got in on the racket, and the Obama administration settled with them, agreeing to fork over an additional $760 million. The government also reimbursed hundreds of millions of dollars in legal fees, a cornucopia for trial lawyers who also happen to be large contributors to Obama and the Democratic Party. Altogether the Pigford payout is estimated to have cost taxpayers a staggering $4.4 billion.3

New York Times article I’d read that reported widespread fatigue, stress, and unhappiness among American lawyers—most especially female ones.

I googled Clara Shortridge Foltz. She had been a famous suffragette and the first female lawyer in California. After her husband had left her and her five children, she’d gone on to become to become the first woman admitted to the California bar and had later run for governor at the age of eighty-one.

Some of my Black sistas don’t know any better, so I’d like to give them some enlightening food-for-thought. Many of them are in awe when it comes to Michelle Obama. They admire and celebrate her intelligence and beauty. For many Black women, she’s a positive and powerful role model. Our former First Lady is phenomenal to say the least! She’s a lawyer, writer, and she fearlessly wears many other hats with integrity and grace. But, here’s what I’d like to point out: If you can admire and celebrate her, why can’t you do the same for YOUR family and friends? Why is it that when people that you personally know obtain degrees, start a successful business, buy a home, are financially secure, happily married, etc… Here you go hatin’ on them. Why can’t you genuinely be happy for them and share in their greatness? I encourage you to celebrate the Black women around you, too!

Is the suggestion that democracy requires a fair trail for all, except those charged with crimes against women? There are many brilliant feminist lawyers who defend people charged with serious sexual violence for a living. They are precisely the people who should be defending those trials. They challenge the evidence properly and legitimately. They make sure that the accused has a fair trail, and that any conviction is a safe one. But in doing so they do not pander to myths about female behaviour that are not only outdated, but demonstrably false. It is these lawyers, above all others, who are bringing the justice system up to date. We need more of them.

and as it turns out, every lawyer I spoke to agreed Sarah was more than qualified. Not sure I believe that. Probably just has to do with all the ‘female empowerment’ hype these days,

In 1950 there would be 31,707 male lawers in New York State. There would be 1,275 female lawyers in New York State. There would be 19 Negro women lawyers in New York State. Put otherwise, black women constituted about 6 10,000ths (0.06%) of all the state's layers. A proportion so small that it is less a minority than a rounding error.

For example, I learned that it was my right under international law to be told why I was being arrested, but the night the military took me from my home, I wasn’t told why. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Israel also ratified in 1991, says that all persons, including children, should be given reasons for their arrest at the time of their arrest. Another violation occurred when the soldiers posed with me, a minor, while taking my picture before leading me into the police station. They had no right to humiliate me like that, nor to film my arrest and publish the video without my parents’ permission. And then there was the interrogation. Banning my parents and my lawyer from being with me and putting me in a room alone with men and no female officers were all clear violations. The way the interrogators shouted at me, threatened me, and sexually harassed me by commenting on my appearance in order to coerce a confession were all breaches of the Convention Against Torture. The fact that I was held so long in pretrial detention was another violation.

Ram Ray was six foot tall, with silky black moustaches, melting brown eyes, and a sales patter which could sell vealburgers to a vegan. Particularly a female vegan. ‘Fair offer would be you giving me the car plus a monkey for the work I’ve done on it,’ said Joe.

When I first started working for Larry Summers, then chief economist at the World Bank, he was married to a tax attorney, Vicki. He was very supportive of Vicki’s career and used to urge her to “bill like a boy.” His view was that the men considered any time they spent thinking about an issue—even time in the shower—as billable hours. His wife and her female colleagues, however, would decide that they were not at their best on a given day and discount hours they spent at their desks to be fair to the client. Which lawyers were more valuable to that firm? To make his point, Larry told them the story of a renowned Harvard Law School professor who was asked by a judge to itemize a bill. The professor responded that he could not because he was so often thinking about two things at once.

Spallanzani was a genial, round-faced, baldheaded man who looked a bit like actor Wally Shawn. Born in northern Italy in 1729 to a lawyer and his well-connected wife, at the age of twenty he embarked on the study of law at the University of Bologna, where his cousin Laura Bassi was the first female professor of physics and mathematics in Europe.

It is just after 2 p.m. and the restaurant is packed with dozens of diners when a suicide bomber from the West Bank, a 27-year old female apprentice lawyer, shoulders her way into the restaurant. She detonates herself using a bomb that is packed with ball bearings and shrapnel to ensure the maximum number of deaths. Because Zvi’s mother is running a bit late, when she arrives at the restaurant she is still far enough from the blast for her life to be savable. The horrific aftermath of the explosion leaves some of the dead still sitting upright at their tables, while others, including children and babies, are slammed against the walls.

You can use your skills to do any number of things, as long as you can talk other people into it. As part 2 of this book explains, what you’ve enjoyed doing in the past can be the starting point for an entirely different career. I thought that my experience counseling clients might lead to a successful career in development. My experience organizing networks of women lawyers helped me qualify for a job organizing networks of largely female angel investors. My love of talking in courtrooms translated to a love of teaching in classrooms. But I had to reframe those skills and make those connections before I could convince anyone else to do so. If I can do it, you can too.

As long as the courts are controlled by men, females will continue to suffer. Today many of the female judges and lawyers who work in the legal system end up working to appease men ...and not to serve justice.

Kippering grunted. “Well, being a lawyer is not all that and a pot of porridge. Many times I’ve had to stand and watch justice-call it fair play, in the world of business schemes and contracts-be subverted due to a lying tongue or a bag of dirty money. No matter how highly you begin, such things have a way of chewing your lofty ideals down to the size of rum bottles and any warm female body you can afford, so please don’t begrudge my choice of exquisite brainwash.

Why does your girlfriend hate this place so much?” Fury kept her attention on the shadows between the stalls, the vendors and shoppers. “Her brother was a fighter here.” Hunt started. “Does Bryce know?” Fury nodded shallowly. “He was talented—Julius. The Viper Queen recruited him from his training gym, promised him riches, females, everything he wanted if he signed himself into her employ. What he got was an addiction to her venom, putting him in her thrall, and a contract with no way out.” A muscle ticked in Fury’s jaw. “June’s parents tried everything to get him freed. Everything. Lawyers, money, pleas to Micah for intervention—none of it worked. Julius died in a fight ten years ago. June and her parents only learned about it because the Viper Queen’s goons dumped his body on their doorstep with a note that said Memento Mori on it.

Now we know that the most feminist action any female can take on her behalf is doing the work of creating positive self-esteem, the foundation of self-love. For it is that grounding that prepares us to love fully and well. Whether we do the work of being an astronaut, a lawyer, or a garbage collector, or whether we happily choose to be self-employed or a stay-at-home homemaker, wise women know that self-love will determine the degree to which we will feel fulfilled by any of these task.

By the late 1830s and ’40s, when Margaret was a young single woman living in Providence, Boston, and Cambridge, New England had become the first region in the country with a shortage of men. The overcrowded job market and economic volatility that drove her lawyer father back to farming and her younger brothers to seek employment in the South and West created this imbalance, leaving one third of Boston’s female population unmarried. Little wonder that Margaret toyed for a while with the notion that only an unmarried woman could “represent the female world.” Her argument was theoretical: American wives belonged by law to their husbands and could not act independently. Yet she also spoke for a surging population of women, many of them single, who sought usefulness outside the home and who readily joined the political life of the nation by advocating causes from temperance to abolition long before they gained the right to vote.

Something extraordinary happens when female anger and lawyering meet,

This is not to say that there are no structural solutions. Take the issue of women being interrupted. An analysis of fifteen years of Supreme Court oral arguments found that ‘men interrupt more than women, and they particularly interrupt women more than they interrupt other men’.73 This goes for male lawyers (female lawyers weren’t found to interrupt at all) as well as judges, even though lawyers are meant to stop speaking when a justice starts speaking. And, as in the political sphere, the problem seems to have got worse as female representation on the bench has increased

I found the numerous surprise meetings with the female harassers to be very unprofessional, possibly illegal, and aimed to make sure that you had no legal support in the meetings from an employment lawyer.

Given the devoutly Catholic household in which the family was raised, it is not especially surprising that two of Philip’s daughters became nuns: Mary, who entered St. Mary’s convent in Monroe and took the name Sister Christina, and Martha, later known as Sister Clementine.5 More unusual was the path followed by Philip’s daughter Frances. After finishing high school in two years, this brilliant young woman went on to the Detroit College of Law—this when only 5 percent of all American youths went to college.6 After graduating, she became a practicing attorney—one of only two hundred female lawyers in the entire country at the time—and, later, a founding member of the Women Lawyers Association of Michigan.7