At the New Jersey State Bar Association (NJSBA) Women’s Leadership Conference last week, which celebrated the legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a panel of five sitting and former New Jersey Supreme Court justices reflected on the enormous changes that women in the legal profession have experienced since the noted jurist entered the law.
Nearly 300 people attended the virtual conference, titled “I Dissent: Celebrating the Legacy of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Power of Speaking Up,” which was sponsored by the NJSBA Women in the Profession Section (WIPS) and the Diversity Committee.
Susan L. Nardone, chair of WIPS and a director in the employment and labor law group at Gibbons in Newark, moderated the panel, which included sitting justices Jaynee LaVecchia, Anne Patterson and Fabiana Pierre-Louis and former justices Virginia A. Long and Helen Hoens.
Long and Hoens, who entered the field around the time Ginsburg started practicing, spoke about the generational difference in their careers and how much progress has been made for women in the legal profession
Hoens said when she began practicing in a big law firm in New York, she and other female attorneys weren’t welcome.
“Discrimination against women was both blatant and brutal. And there weren’t any protections for anyone who dared to speak up, so most of us, motivated by self-preservation, were forced into silence,” she said.
Long said the women of her generation worked hard to prove themselves.
“We knew we were going to cast a long shadow on everyone who came after us because there were so few of us, and we were watched and observed at all times. So basically, we just outworked the competition, and that’s how we got to be the first judges, the first partners in law firms, the first commissioners, the first elected officials,” she said.
In her opening remarks, NJSBA President Kimberly A. Yonta cited figures that show while for the last 20 years about half of law school graduates in the U.S. have been women, only 36% of lawyers at law firms are women, according to the National Association of Law Placement and an American Bar Association 2018 report, titled “A Current Glance at Women in the Law.” And of those, only 22.7% are partners and 19% equity partners, the report said.
Yonta said while she was heartened by women’s progress in the legal profession, they still encounter bias.
LaVecchia and Patterson noted that women have made so much progress in the legal profession and appear so regularly in their court, that they often don’t notice gender.
Patterson said that she is sometimes halfway through an argument when she’ll suddenly notice all the advocates are women. She’ll think, “I hope my law clerks are watching this. It’s an entire argument where some very high-powered women are speaking. And it gives me great hope for the future to see the talent that’s out there.”
“I think the time for categorizing advocates by gender, at least at the appellate level, is long past,” LaVecchia said.
“Advocates are either smart, prepared and intellectually nimble or they’re not. It’s not a gender thing. Lawyers either have those abilities or they don’t, and the Court truly appreciates it when we see advocates before us who show those characteristics to us,” she said.
A number of Ginsburg’s famous quotes were springboards for the discussion. Reflecting on the jurist’s statement to “[f]ight for the things that you care about but do it in a way that will lead others to join you,” Pierre-Louis said she often led this way when she was a former assistant United States attorney in Trenton, and had to take an unpopular position.
She led with the department of justice’s goals “to be fair and to seek justice,” which she said often helped bring people together.
Long said 120 years after the first woman was admitted to the bar, there needs to be more progress for women in the legal profession.
“Justice Ginsburg’s life’s work was creating an ethical, fair and just workplace, so that in addition to being good at what we do, our job is to continue that work.”
The conference also included a session on Ginsburg’s influence on gender-based discrimination by examining some of her cases as an attorney and when she was on the bench. Speakers included Seton Hall Law School Dean Kathleen Boozang; Rutgers University Law School Vice Dean Rose Cuison-Villazor; Rachel Wainer Apter, director of the New Jersey Division on Civil Rights; and Dalya Youssef, president of the New Jersey Muslim Lawyer’s Association. Maria Vallejo, a co-chair of the NJSBA Diversity Committee, moderated the panel.
Apter spoke about her experience clerking for Ginsburg from 2011– 2012. She said she learned the importance of words from the justice, who communicated with slow, measured speech and made exacting edits on her clerks’ written work. Apter said the justice could dictate a two-page order, with accurate citations, all without notes.
In addition, she said Ginsburg “did not think of the law as a puzzle to be solved or as something to be debated in an ivory tower.…The justice really thought of the law as something that profoundly impacts the lives of everyday people in every single case,” she said.
The conference concluded with a workshop presented by Sheila Murphy, the president and CEO of Focus Forward, on how to improve communication skills.