Quinn on Judge Jean Hortense Norris, New York City, 1912-1955 @maecquinn

Mae C. Quinn, University of Florida College of Law, has published Fallen Woman (Re)framed: Judge Jean Hortense Norris, New York City - 1912-1955 at 67 U. Kan. L. Rev. 451 (2019). Here is the abstract.

This Article seeks to surface and understand more than what is already known about Jean Hortense Norris as a lawyer, jurist, and feminist legal realist—as well as a woman for whom sex very much became part of her professional persona and work. This article analyzes the lack of legal protections provided to Norris and troubling nature of her removal from the bench given the evidence presented and standards applied. Finally, this Article seeks to provide further context for Jean Norris’s alleged misconduct charges to suggest that as a woman who dared to blur gender boundaries, embrace her professional power, and offer a unique vision of the “fairer sex,” she was held to a different standard than her male peers and made to pay the price with her career. In these ways, this Article provides a more complete picture of Jean Norris beyond a shamed and disrobed judge. And it begins to move Judge Norris out of legal history’s margins so that she may be remembered as more than mere mugshot in the American imagination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Henderson on The Intersectional Life and Times of Lutie A Lytle @ProfTajaNia

Taja-Nia Y. Henderson, Rutgers School of Law, Newark, has published ‘I Shall Talk to My Own People’: The Intersectional Life and Times of Lutie A. Lytle at 102 Iowa Law Review 1983 (2017). Here is the abstract.

In the fall of 1898, the Chicago Tribune hailed Lutie A. Lytle of Topeka as the “only female law instructor in the world.” Notwithstanding this purported shattering of the legal academy’s glass ceiling, Lytle’s accomplishments — her path to the professoriate, and her career in the years following her appointment to the faculty of a Nashville law school — have been largely lost to historians of legal education. She is not among those honored or commemorated by our profession, and her name is largely unknown beyond a small circle of interest. The biographical sketch that follows fills this scholarly gap through an examination of Lytle as a historical figure, using contemporary newspaper accounts and other primary source material to provide context for her achievements and linking her life to previously understudied legal, political and social movements.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Quéma on M. Nourbese Philip's Zong! and Gregson v. Gilbert

Anne Quéma, Acadia University, has published M. Nourbese Philip's Zong!: Metaphors, Laws, and Fugues of Justice at 43 Journal of Law and Society 85 (2016). Here is the abstract.

Focusing on Gregson v. Gilbert, the article considers colonialism as a historical chain of events with the Middle Passage as a major locus of association among humans, things, the sea, trade, transportation, maritime law, and finance speculation. Out of this assemblage emerged slavery as a racist socius through which the metaphor of the human‐thing circulated. In citing Gregson v. Gilbert, M.N. Philip's poem Zong! seeks to bear responsibility to the reified bodies of the murdered Africans by generating a poetics of relationality that disassembles and reassembles the legal words as sign‐objects on the page. Her gendered address to the law exposes the rape that Africa endured. Bearing witness to this trauma, her poem speaks to and with the dead, recognizing the singularity of the Africans' languages, of which as human‐things they were deprived. Gathering readers and listeners, the poem creates an event through which an ethics of justice might materialize.

The full text is not available from SSRN.

ABA Seeking Nominations For the Margaret Brent Lawyers of Achievement Award

The American Bar Association is seeking nominations for the Margaret Brent Award. The Award recognizes female attorneys who excel in law and have assisted other women in the field. More information and instructions for making nominations are below. Visit the ABA webpage on the award here.

The Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, established by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession in 1991, recognizes and celebrates the accomplishments of women lawyers who have excelled in their field and have paved the way to success for other women lawyers.
Call for Nominations for the
2016 Margaret Brent Awards

Deadline for Nominations -
Friday, December 4, 2015
The 2016 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Awards will be presented on Sunday, August 7, 2016 in San Francisco during the ABA Annual Meeting.
Nomination Criteria and Application RequirementsNomination FormThank You to Our Generous 2015 Supporters2015 Commemorative Program and Tribute Book
Previous Award Recipients
Honorees receiving the Margaret Brent Award have achieved professional excellence in their field and

• influenced other woman to pursue legal careers,

• opened doors for women lawyers in a variety of job settings that historically were closed to them, and/or

• advanced opportunities for women within a practice area or segment of the profession.

View the list of distinguished award recipients

CBS Interested In Legal Drama Based On Gloria Allred's Career

Deborah Schoeneman is writing the script for an as-yet unnamed CBS legal drama based on the career of attorney Gloria Allred. Ms. Schoeneman, Ms. Allred, Peter Principato, and Paul Young will executive produce. More here from The Hollywood Reporter.

A New Novel With an Assertive Lawyer-Protagonist

Heller McAlpine reviews Eliza Kennedy's first novel, I Take You, for NPR.  Says McAlpine in part,

Kennedy, a graduate of the University of Iowa and Harvard Law School, is a former litigator herself, and married to writer Joshua Ferris. Her snappy comedy of mis-manners delights in subverting expectations, from its indictment of monogamy as unnatural to its ardent defense of lawyering and casual sex. Lily unabashedly extols her job: "Because being a lawyer is great. It's mentally engaging and competitive and fun. Work is really the only time that I feel focused." She reconsiders: "That's not true. One other thing focuses me. But I don't get paid for it." She reconsiders again. "That's not true. I got paid for it once."

Read an excerpt of the book here.
More here from the publisher's website.

Where Are the Women?

With a hat tip to Bridget Crawford. Professor Auchmuty has traced one trailblazer.

Rosemary Auchmuty, University of Reading, has published Recovering Lost Lives: Researching Women in Legal History at 42 Journal of Law and Society 34 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Drawing on the research I undertook into the life of Gwyneth Bebb, who in 1913 challenged the Law Society of England and Wales for their refusal to admit women to the solicitors’ profession, this article focuses on the range of sources one might use to explore the lives of women in law, about whom there might be a few public records but little else, and on the ways in which sources, even official ones, might be imaginatively used. It traces the research process from the case that inspired the research (Bebb v. the Law Society [1914] 1 Ch 286) through to the creation of an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and what this means for women's history, emphasizing the importance of asking the ‘woman question’ and seeking out the broader significance of a woman's life in the context of her times.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Australian Women Judges and Lawyers Through the Archives

Heather Roberts, Australian National University College of Law, has published Telling a History of Australian Women Judges Through Courts' Ceremonial Archives at 40 Australian Feminist Law Journal 147 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Swearing-in ceremonies are held to mark the investiture of a new judge on the bench. Transcribed and stored within courts’ public records, these proceedings form a rich ‘ceremonial archive’. This paper showcases the value of this archive for the (re)telling of Australian legal history and, particularly, a history of Australian women lawyers. Using a case study drawn from the swearing-in ceremonies of women judges of the High Court, Federal Court, and Family Courts of Australia between 1993 and 2013, the paper explores what this archive reveals about the Australian legal community’s attitudes towards women in the law. It argues that despite the regional and jurisdictional differences between these courts, recurring themes emerge. Notably, while feminising discourse dominates the earlier ceremonies, stories of the judges’ personal and judicial identity come to display a more overt feminist consciousness by the end of the Labor Governments in power in Australia between 2007 and 2013.

The full text is not available from download.