Episode 14: Lynn Hecht Schafran

Public Interest
Written By Third Boxcar LLC

Senior Vice President/Legal Director of National Judicial Education Program, Legal Momentum

 00:53:02
 

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Show Notes

Lynn Hecht Schafran, the Senior Vice President and Legal Director of the National Judicial Education Program at Legal Momentum, has played a leading role in the advancement of women's rights. Introduced to legal efforts to advance the rights of women by Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself, who was one of Lynn's law professors, Lynn is internationally recognized for her work on gender discrimination and has been active in prompting courts across the country to establish gender bias task forces.

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Lynn Hecht Schafran

Lynn Hecht Schafran

Lynn Hecht Schafran is an internationally recognized attorney specializing in gender discrimination law. Since 1981 she has served as Director of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts (NJEP), a project of Legal Momentum) in cooperation with the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ).  She also serves as Legal Momentum’s Senior Vice President, www.legalmomentum.org. 

 A graduate of Smith College and the Columbia University School of Law, Lynn served as law clerk to federal district court Judge Edmund L. Palmieri in the Southern District of New York and litigated with the New York based law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges. She was Founding Director of the Federation of Women Lawyers Judicial Screen Panel which evaluated individuals the President was about to nominate to the federal bench on the basis of demonstrated commitment to equal justice under law.

 As NJEP’s Director Lynn has designed and presented courses for numerous national, state and federal judicial colleges in the United States and Canada and created model judicial education curricula, videos and web courses.

 NJEP’s judicial education programs prompted state supreme courts and federal circuits across the country to establish high-level task forces to investigate gender bias in their own court systems and recommend reforms. Lynn was an advisor to most of them.

 Lynn was an original member of, and then Special Advisor, to the American Bar Association (ABA) Commission on Women in the Profession, established in 1987. She continues to serve as Legal Momentum’s liaison to the Commission and is a member of the editorial board of the Commission’s digital magazine, Perspectives.

In recognition of her work to eliminate bias in the courts Lynn has received a number of awards, among them the first Distinguished Service Award of the National Association of Women Judges. She has also received the Smith College Medal and the American Bar Association Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, and, from her long-ago former law firm, the Weil Luminary Alumnus Award. 

Lynn met M.C. Sungaila in1996 when they each filed an amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case against Judge David Lanier, a powerful Tennessee judge ultimately convicted of violating the constitutional rights of five women -- four court employees and one litigant -- whom he sexually assaulted in his courtroom and chambers, 520 U.S. 259 (l997).

 

Transcript

I'm very pleased to welcome Lynn Hecht Schafran who has done amazing work for a sustained period of time with Legal Momentum and serves as Senior Vice President and the Director of the National Judicial Education Program at Legal Momentum. Thank you so much and welcome, Lynn. 

Thank you, MC. A lot of my work has been going on parallel, intersecting and working with MC. We have been working together since 1996. I learned about MC in the context of a horrendous case involving a judge who was sexually assaulting women court employees and a litigant. MC was working on a cert petition to get the Supreme Court to take this case. Somehow this happened because then I ended up writing a brief as well. That's how we met. I should add that MC has worked her magic again and wrote for Legal Momentum an amicus brief in a cert petition to the Supreme Court under the Federal Crime Victim’s Rights Act for a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. She turned this around and it must be some new record, not just for MC but for anybody.

That encapsulates the importance of the work that you do, what Legal Momentum does, and the role that you play in the judicial system, especially for women and girls. I wanted to ask about that to begin with. What is the focus of Legal Momentum? There's a range of work that you've done with them, including the National Judicial Education Program. I want to get a snapshot of that. 

Legal Momentum was established under the name of NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund in 1970. It was an offspring of the National Organization for Women. It was an analog to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. In 2004, we were advised by people in the corporate branding world to change our name because we were told that young people do not know what a functional name is. They don't know what is a Legal Defense and Education Fund.

We are officially Legal Momentum and the tagline is, “The women's legal defense fund.” When we started, we were the first and the only game in town. As a result, we covered the waterfront. Whatever issue was coming up for women in the workplace or having to do with violence, we were right there front and center. 

Over the years, as what happens with any project or issue, the field radiates and lots of people become involved as generalists or with a very special focus. For example, speaking about what's going on. Once upon a time, we were very involved in reproductive rights work. Now there are entities that do nothing else and they have a level of day-to-day expertise. 

In our work, we are always very involved in issues having to do with gender-based violence. In 1991, we were approached by then-Senator Biden's staff about working with them to develop what became the Violence Against Women Act. Her name is Victoria Nourse. She's a professor at Georgetown. We spent four years joined at the hip 24/7 with Senator Biden's Senate Judiciary Committee staff. 

The bill passed in 1994. It provides for re-authorizations because they are funding levels. We use those re-authorization periods as an opportunity to work with this huge national task force that we originally created to pass VAWA. It’s an opportunity to hear from victims, survivors, service providers, people who have not been heard, and issues that were not on our agenda. 

When we began in 1991, whoever heard of coercive control? Who knew anything about teen violence? Who knew that women from tribal communities were enduring the worst rate of sexual violence of any group of women in the country, maybe excepting women with physical or mental disabilities? What we learn as we go along informs what we do at each five-year re-authorization. The problem is what was once a straightforward bi-partisan passage has become very politicized over the years. 

 

We are all prisoners of the social culture in which we live in.

 

We thought that the Senate version of VAWA was going to drop, and it's been postponed until the New Year. The house has passed a version but gender-based violence is something that we are deeply concerned with, any issue related to workplace equality and schools issues that we care about. My colleague, Jennifer Becker, was the Title IX coordinator for the entire city public school system of New York. In addition, she had been a prosecutor before that and has a tremendous depth of knowledge around issues relating to Title IX. Those are areas where we are particularly focusing at the moment. When I say gender-based violence, this includes everything from trafficking to sexual harassment at the K to 12 levels.

I remember even other cases that we were mutually involved in like the Civil Rights Remedy of the Violence Against Women Act, and also the peer-to-peer sexual harassment case that was before the US Supreme Court as well. We’re involved for a sustained period of time in the development of the law, both legislatively and judicially, in areas that affect women and girls.

As far as I can see, you have a good radar for where the system has failed. There's a sense of outrage like, “I can't believe this is happening in this setting.” Whether it was the linear case or even our recent case, you have a real commitment to those kinds of cases because you have a commitment to the system working, and it's very disturbing when it doesn't.

Apropos to the Civil Rights Remedy in the Violence Against Women Act, Chief Justice Rehnquist hated it from the minute he heard about it. He did everything that he could to prevent it from being enacted. With the help of the National Association of Women Judges, which is the cosponsor of my Judicial Education Program, I was able to prevent the American Bar Association from taking a position that would have been misunderstood. People would have thought, “They’re against the entire VAWA,” when it was just that one section.

I raised that again. I said, “I don't want you to think that we have given up on Civil Rights Remedy.” Victoria Nourse who’s a professor of Georgetown, she and I did a practicum. We finished the third year looking at different ways that we can create a new Civil Rights Remedy that will pass muster in the Supreme Court. The case itself has been so roundly criticized because when you get 38 state Attorneys General putting in a brief on your side and then the Supreme Court says, “It's not a national problem. There were only 38 of them,” there’s something wrong with that. A lot of law professors I know say they teach this case as an example of something that went wrong, but we do not give up easily.

I remember after Morrison came out and seeing the decision becoming part of the Constitutional Law textbooks and the students who were coming through our law firm reading this case, I'm like, “We worked on that.” I wished it had come out a different way but it's always interesting to see the things that you are working on in real-time end up being important cases that other study. Almost immediately down the line, maybe even try and determine it another way in the future. Tell me about the Judicial Education Program and the association with the National Association of Women Judges. What's the focus of that? Has that changed over time?

The idea for the National Judicial Education Program was born at the same time as NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund/Legal Momentum in 1970. The lawyers were the first to step up and say, “As the National Organization for Women, we need our version of the inc fund.” They were Title VII lawyers. They were going into court. Here was this terrific new legislation, not so new in 1970 passed in ‘64 but just beginning to be used.

The judges didn't get it at all. They thought that it was chivalrous not to allow a woman to pick up an object weighing 35 pounds. If that did her out of a good job, so be it. The notion was that we need to do something to provide judges with some education, not advocacy or partisanship, about the real world that they lacked. They haven't gotten much of it yet. I look back at the Lilly Ledbetter case and I think, “Here we have a group of judges sitting on the US Supreme Court who knew nothing about how the real world operates.”

At the end of that brouhaha and debacle, what Ruth Ginsburg wrote was, “We now have to turn to Congress.” Congress stepped in right away because it was so clear that it was an absurd decision. The notion was that we need to be involved in judicial education, which was just beginning in 1970 to become something that judges did.

 

It was even formalized prior to that.

The National Judicial College was just getting done and so on. It took ten years to get the NJEP going because when it was proposed like let's say, you have a new project and you're a nonprofit, you need to fund it. You would talk to funders, journalists and judges. They’ll either say, “It’s never going to happen. The judges will never admit that there is such a thing as bias against women in their courtrooms.” The other thing that was said all the time was, “This is not necessary. Judges are impartial. This is their job description.”

It took ten years to get enough funding to even get this off the ground. In terms of what judges don't know, and I don't mean this in a pejorative way, we weren't taught this in Law School, judges are unfair in this country. I use that word meaningfully. In other countries, if you want to be a judge, there's a track that you go through. You go through training on how to be a judge.

I'm not saying that cures all the problems. I don't mean that at all but the best example I can give you is this. In the early 1990s, I decided to write a very elaborate curriculum for judges on understanding sexual violence cases. We presented it around the country. In 2000, I added a unit on neuroscience so the judges would understand when a victim says, “I froze. I thought it was a dream. I was watching myself standing by the bed.” What did that mean? Is that real?

Out of that, I decided that I was going to create a publication that judges could have at any point in their careers. I sent out a one-question survey to a large number of judges who had participated in this program over the years. It had one question, “What did you wish you had known before you presided in an adult victim sexual assault case?” We got so many answers that I had to cut it off at 25 issues.

I published this publication that's called Judges Tell: What I Wish I Had Known Before I Presided in an Adult Victim Sexual Assault Case. What came back, first of all, I appreciated the candor of these judges because they admitted that they did not know anything. If you think about the fact that someone is coming into court with a typical case, she or he was raped by someone they know, a relative, a coach or a teacher. The judge is sitting there saying, “It couldn't be those kinds of people. That doesn't happen. Rape is strangers in a dark alley.” No, it's not.

The answers started with, “I wish I had known that most rapes are committed by someone the victim knows.” I don't think bias or advocacy to want the people who are presiding in these cases to be knowledgeable on a factual basis. When they're not, I'll give you the perfect example of what can happen. One of the things that have come out of the National Judicial Education Program quite serendipitously is that we encouraged people to develop information about their jurisdictions before doing judicial education around these issues.

A New Jersey judge went home and said, “Can I have a committee to do some inquiry and research so we could do something at the Judicial College?” Chief Justice Wilentz from New Jersey appointed this fabulous thing, the New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force on Women in the Courts, and away we went. We made the front page of the New York Times when we were reported. I always say that's the first in line because then every state wanted to.

Here’s one example from New York City. Richard, who’s a family court judge in New York, came to testify and he told this story about himself. He said, “I had two cases back to back, eleven-year-old girls, allegations of incest, nice middle-class families. I threw them out of court because I knew that in families like that, there's no incest.” The prosecutors were so upset that they bought him one of the very first books that were ever written about incest in “nice families.”

 

We are on the eve of 2022, and there’s still so much that’s wrong vis-à-vis women lawyers’ experience in our profession. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for it.

 

Richard was so appalled by what he had done that he came in and told the story about himself. He said, “I would never do anything like that again. I had no idea.” There's so much confusion about this issue. It's not a question of bias, prejudice or advocacy for one side or the other to want to have the judges that were sitting on any kind of case to be informed about the factual background of what they're looking at.

On the appellate round, the broader context is provided through amicus briefs. In the individual cases in the trial level, you'll have experts testifying about things, but if you can never get to that point to have the testimony then you're not going to have those cases heard. It does seem worthwhile to have that education about the context in which these things arise so when a judge has a case come to him or her, they have a larger context for it and don't completely put something out of hand as being not possible, fantastical or something like that.

This case was talked about a lot in connection with post-doc, but preliminary to post-doc, we had Pricewaterhouse. I met a woman who was the star performer at Pricewaterhouse bringing in $20 million worth of contracts a year. She didn't make a partner and they said, “If she wanted to make a partner, she had to walk more femininely, wear jewelry and makeup.” They also didn't like the fact that occasionally she cursed at people who were stupid and did dumb things.

Someone subsequently became our Legal Director at Legal Momentum, Sally Burns. She’s a professor at NYU Law. Sally brought in a professor, Susan Fiske, who was a psychologist to talk about all the research that existed about sex stereotyping and how sex stereotype works in the workplace. The judge was so taken aback. The judge was wonderful at the trial level but he couldn't believe that this was still going on in this year and in this community. We had the same thing at the Supreme Court, “Do you mean to say that this is how people think about women?”

It’s 2022 and that's exactly what we're still dealing with. In 1983, I wrote an article for Trial Magazine that was called Assumptions vs. Abilities: Women Litigators in the Courts. We saw a new report that the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession has put out. It is the same thing. If you're powerful and you exhibit the qualities that we need and want in a litigator, then you’re a bitch. It goes on from there. If we look at why are women leaving the profession, it’s because within their law firms and outside it, they are still being treated in a highly discriminatory manner.

One thing that was disturbing to me was the Commissioner of Women in the Profession has the magazine called Perspective. At an editorial board meeting, we're talking about ideas. I showed everybody the cover of a new book out that's called Code of Silence. It’s about a Texas Federal District Court judge who was a sexual predator, and what it took to get him off the bench and into prison.

I was taken aback by the comments that my colleagues on this call made. They fastened on this title, Code of Silence. They said, “When we were coming up in the profession and even now, we did not talk about what was happening and what was being done to us because we knew that if we brought it up, it would be used against us. It was better to keep our mouth shut, grin and bear it and move on.” To hear this group of very accomplished people talking about the fact that this book title encompasses their personal experience of being in the law is profoundly disturbing.

I wanted to step back a little bit in terms of how you decided to go into the law and how you came to do this very important and unusual work. Some people would wish that they could do this but there aren't that many positions like yours. What brought you to the law? Was it this kind of work that you wanted to do?

I had a little detour. I had a first career in the art history business because of learning about sexism at Harvard Law School. I have been in practice as a lawyer and as an art historian for a very long time. We are going back to the fall of 1961. I was at Smith College. I was an Art History major. I'm walking across the campus and I see someone whom I don't see very often. She says, “What are you doing next fall?” I said, “Everyone assumes I'm going ahead in Art History but I've always been interested in the Law. I'm going to take the LSATs and see what happens. If I do well, I'll apply to Harvard and Yale and see how it goes.”

 This woman said to me, “Did you know that Harvard Law School did not admit women until the 1950s?” I said, “You're kidding me.” She said, “No, it's true.” I said, “If you think that I'm going to sit through a full-day exam to go to some sexist institution like that, forget it.” I did not take the LSATs. I went ahead and had a career in the art history business. I taught at Smith. I worked at The Museum of Modern Art. It reached a point where it was time for the next chapter.

With my two careers, I've had my mother's side because she was a very prominent interior designer and architectural consultant in New York. I did that first, then there was my father's side because he was a lawyer. Before I had worked on the National Judicial Education Program, NLDEF/Legal Momentum was the fiscal agent for a project that involved Federal judicial selection. We created this out of whole cloth when Griffin Bell, who was Jimmy Carter's Attorney General said that a panel of women attorneys could have the same opportunity to vet people who were about to be nominated by the President at the American Bar Association and the National Bar Association.

The notion that came into my head when I was asked if I would invent this was like my father's voice ringing in my ear, “There is nothing worse than appearing before a judge you don't respect.” That informed my choice, “I’m going to do that. How could I not?” While I was doing that, NOW Legal Defense/Legal Momentum had invited Professor Norma Wikler, very sadly deceased, who was a professor of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz to get the National Judicial Education Program going. There finally seemed to be a little bit of money that could make this happen.

Norma was a sociologist. She only knew one judge back in California. Norma had this unexpected opportunity to do something at the National Judicial College. The woman who was then our Legal Director at NOW Legal Defense/Legal Momentum, Phyllis Segal, had been my colleague because we had both done a stint in big law which neither of us was ever interested in doing.

I was told by people like Ruth Ginsburg, who was my law professor, “You have to go to a big firm for a year or two and see how it's done.” Phyllis escaped before I did. She went over to become the first Legal Director at NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund. She called me up and said, “Lynn, we have this project. In addition to inventing the Federation of Women Lawyers Judicial screening panel, you have to help Norma because she's going to do this little seminar at the National Judicial College.”

I worked with Norma. She had to leave because she’s a tenured professor. After two years, she had to go back. She said, “You have to take this over.” I said, “Nobody seems to be interested in having us come and talk to them. I will do this for six months and we will see what happens.” Those six months had stretched out because I officially started in this job in October 1981 and here we are.

The program has expanded quite a bit in that timeframe. That’s another example of the times of judicial education itself being a recognized thing through the college and that growing. There's an opportunity for your program to also exist. People have a need or interest in that.

In terms of expansion, what's interesting to me is to see the issues and things that NJEP was talking about years ago. Implicit bias is the flavor of the month. You cannot turn around without bumping into an implicit bias case. My hope is that talking about these problems as implicit bias would help people to deal with how excited everybody gets and upset if you talk about gender, race or religious bias.

Also, coming to understand this is the human condition. We are all prisoners of the social culture in which we live. We’re meant to live in little tribes and not like the people who are not exactly like us. That would help. I'm not sure that it's helping and it can. All the implicit bias work that goes on, I haven't seen a whole lot of research. I don't mean to say that people shouldn't go on and do this but I haven't seen a lot of stuff that says, “This is changing things.” Maybe it's out there and I haven't bumped into it. I hope so.

 

Going in with your eyes open is really important. Don’t have any illusions.

 

Justice Ginsburg was your law professor. How was that?

After she was my law professor, she became my friend. We’ve had a long time together. The first time I had to go and meet with her, I was terrified. You spent five minutes in her company or her classroom and you knew that she was operating up here. In addition to that, I was very sick the night before. She had assigned me to do a certain amount of work or aspect of a case that she was working on. We all worked on her cases, which was quite wonderful because it wasn't abstract. It was real.

I had reserved hours of this night to prepare and I was in no condition to do that. I talked to myself, “Should I cancel this meeting or should I go and say, ‘I'm not prepared?’” In the event, I went and she began to talk to me. You know how precise she was in the way she spoke. It’s not that she was going on so quickly that you couldn't follow but every word counted. After a few minutes, I had to say to her, “Professor Ginsburg, I apologize but I have to tell you, I was ill last night. I am not prepared. If you don't slow down and tell this to me in words of one syllable that I can process, we're going to have to do this over again.” She was the kindest and most compassionate person.

I took her class and seminar. I worked for her in the summertime. I continued to know her and feel incredibly fortunate to know her. The judge for whom I clerked, Edmund Palmieri, was the judge who gave Ruth a clerkship when nobody else would give her one because she was married, had a child and was Jewish. This is my favorite story. Judge Palmieri allowed Ruth to become his law clerk. There are two parts to the story. One is that he wasn't sure how he felt about having a woman law clerk. Another quite famous law professor who was a feeder for him said, “If you don't take Ruth, I will not send anybody else your way but since you're worried about this, I have a guy lined up who's at some big law firm waiting in the wings if Ruth doesn't work out.”

Ruth begins to clerk for Judge Palmieri. Judge Palmieri rode home every night with Learned Hand. Learned Hand and Judge Palmieri were sitting in the front seat and Ruth is sitting in the back. Learned Hand is talking about how he would never have a woman law clerk because that would interfere with his salty language.

You went to a big law firm but then had the opportunity because of your connections to go to Legal Momentum. What would you suggest for women who might be interested in a public interest career or a nonprofit career? Are there any suggestions you would have for them in terms of how to arrange for that to happen?

When people used to ask me that, I used to say, “Pick your life partner very carefully as someone who wants to support you.” I spoke about this at the Federation of Women Lawyers Judicial screening panel. When it was first formed, there was a commitment from a particular foundation. They were going to fund it and then at the last minute, they decided they wouldn't fund it. I said, “I'm not going to do this if it's a total freebie.” My husband said, “Yes, you are because you're not going to let the Carter Administration think that the Women's Movement couldn't pull this opportunity off. I'm going to feed you, I promise. You have to do this.”

The thing is you will not be earning a big law salary but then you will be doing work that hopefully is next to your heart. There are so many more public interest opportunities and many different kinds of organizations that are working on so many different aspects of various kinds of religious bias, ethnic bias, LGBTQ issues and police reform. The opportunities are certainly more widespread than they were when I started in this work with the main issues of funding and who can hire. A nonprofit organization is like an accordion. When the funding is coming in, you expand and bring on staff.

I had an email from an organization. I admire their work. It is phenomenal in terms of the work they do on sexual violence, police and so on. I had an email from them that said at the end of this cycle, something they're finishing up, this is the first time they will not have any Federal funding at all. I was so taken aback because if there were anything that should be funded, it would be this organization.

The police love them. The people acknowledge that they learn so much from them. These are not easy things, to put it mildly, but the opportunities are there. I think of someone who was once our legal director who had a very interesting approach. She knew she wanted to work particularly on what we used to call welfare issues.

She went to work for a big law firm and did not live on her big law salary. She put it all away, invested it and then she became our legal director. She's now a law professor. Law professors are paid pretty well. She had a very clear vision of what she wanted to do and what she needed to do to be able to realize that. If you go to big law briefly, pay off your loans, don't live large, and then go and look for the job of your dreams.

That commitment, planning and discipline to do that are important to have. That was very smart of her to put that aside and be prepared to do things that might not pay off the loans as fast. Any other advice that you would have for women lawyers that are new or experienced in terms of what you've seen in women's progress in the profession or anything that you think would be helpful?

Even though you and I have been talking about the fact that here we are on the eve of 2022 and there's still so much that's wrong vis-a-vis with women lawyers' experiences in our profession, that doesn't mean you shouldn't go for it. We need you. We do. Whether it's the law or engineering, going in with your eyes open is important. Don't have any illusions. There are a lot of people who think that because there are a few women on the Supreme Court that everything is fine and women have arrived. We haven't arrived. It's important not to be naive but it doesn't mean that you should not do what you feel is your calling.

For myself, I went to law school expecting to work on racial discrimination issues. I wanted to be a Civil Rights lawyer and work on race issues. I met Ruth Ginsburg. She's been called the Thurgood Marshall of the Women's Movement. Ruth took these ideas and said, “I can use these for all women.” It was an incredible opportunity for me. I'm so grateful that our time intersected and I've been able to do this work.

There are a lot of avenues where you can be at big law and be doing other things. A long time ago, I was a member of the New York City Bar Association. I had a committee called Sex & Law. I served as the chair of that committee. I did a lot of work on gay rights. I was with the person who brought on my successor, someone who’s very active in the LGBT community. Between the two of us, we were able to get the city bar to establish a committee focused on LGBTQ issues.

NY Bar Association is a wonderful opportunity to work in partnership. In an organization like Legal Momentum, we are indebted to the big law bar. Even though we may not want to work there ourselves, we are constantly working pro bono with firms that can turn out these kinds of briefs. They have the staff and people who could do fact-checking in the middle of the night. They could get everything printed. Working in areas that you particularly care about is a way to get your foot into the door to learn what organizations are working on these issues, then maybe to come over to our side and be doing that full-time as well.

There are no guarantees when you get there. We're working on another case. A woman who's going by the name of Jane Rowe had amazing credentials. All her life, she wanted to be a Federal public defender. She got that job. She was so horribly harassed that it is frightening to read the briefs in this case. That’s the terrible luck of the draw. The thing is this can happen to you anywhere. You can be an engineer reading about things going on at Space X. You can be a sales associate at a big department store. It doesn't matter. This is the reality of life, particularly for women.

Do not be naive and don't think that human resources is your friend. They are not. They are the friend of the company that employs them. Keep records all the time. I mean that with all seriousness. Every day, whatever happens, you go home, write it down and keep that record at home. If you ever need it, you have it. It's complete, contemporaneous and offsite.

 

Keep good records all the time.

 

It's good advice in terms of considering pro bono work, bar association work and the direct work that bar associations are doing on issues for women in areas of inclusion, diversity and a range of areas that the ABA commission puts out. There are a lot of ways to be involved in this work, even if you aren't full-time at a nonprofit organization like you are. It can also give you a sense of whether you enjoy doing that work and might want to do the reality of it full-time in a nonprofit situation. You bring so much to Legal Momentum into the work because of your longevity with it.

I always know when we're talking about issues that you have this encyclopedic memory of things where you'll say, “This is perfect for this. I remember this back from this.” It might even be news reports that you read from many years ago. It's completely on point and appropriate for us to include in a brief. It's so valuable to have that longstanding view of what's been going on in these areas. Too frequently because of funding, people are only in their positions for short periods at nonprofits. It’s good to have the resource in so many different ways. You’re so wonderful to work with. I wanted to end with lightning round questions to see quick answers and see what you come up with. Which talent would you most like to have that you don't have?

I would like to be able to play the stride piano. Ruth wanted to be an opera star. I want to be able to play.

What is the trait that you most deplore in yourself or others?

Those are two completely different things. What I deplore about myself is how people organize their workspaces. There are spreaders and people who go in the pile. I’ve worked remotely for quite some time and I think of my home as a snow globe. There’s just drift of papers every day, more and more. In the days when I had 200 physical file cabinets, I did it differently but I wish that I could figure out a way. People who work on their computers. I seem to need the tactile encouragement of paper. I would like to change that. In others, it’s any kind of cruelty, whether it's hazing in a fraternity or sorority setting. You name it. I deplore that.

Who are your favorite writers?

I'm not a good person to ask that because I read like a magpie. I don't have a favorite. I rarely reread. I am reading a book about one of the Leakey family, Meave Leakey, paleontology and fossils. I’m also reading a book about the history of paper because I'm interested in paper-making. The last is a powerful book I read. Many of your readers may know that the Metropolitan Opera put on the first opera written by an African-American composer and it's called Fire Shut Up In My Bones.

It's based on a memoir by a man named Charles Blow. I read the memoir. It is powerful, gorgeously written and very disturbing. It brings everything back full circle to someplace that we started at the beginning. This author, Charles Blow, was sexually abused by a cousin when he was seven years old. If you want to know what dissociation means, he writes about this since he was a seven-year-old boy. He's up on the ceiling watching this happen. The writing is very powerful and beautiful but I read like a magpie.

For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

I'm grateful for everything. I'm grateful that my life turned out as I had, I don't want to say envisioned it. That's not quite right because I was never somebody who had that idea, but I knew in a general way how I would like my life to turn out. I have been incredibly fortunate in that. Freud said you can't have both. You can't have it going well in work and love. I managed for many years to be married to the wonderful Larry Schafran.

I have two wonderful children, David and Brooke and a wonderful daughter-in-law Karen. I have a work that I do feel very deeply about and that totally engages me. I've been doing that work for decades. I've been so fortunate in having this turnout. That is not to say that there have not been some difficulties along the way like health issues, and all the things that happen to any human being. In the global sense, I've been extremely fortunate.

Given the choice of anyone you can choose for a dinner guest, who would you invite?

In the New York Times book review, they always have at the end where they're into asking someone in particular. They say, “Who would you like to invite to your dinner party?” They always have a very impressive list. I am going to say something different. I would like to have my grandmothers because when I was growing up, you didn't ask people about their histories in the way that folks do now.

I know very little about either of them. I know that one of them was allowed to study music, wanted to be an opera diva and was told, “There’s no going on the stage for you.” The other one left a bad marriage in Europe and came here with a child when she was 16, 17 years old herself. She didn't speak English, came to the United States and made her way. I would like to have them both sitting at the dinner table and telling me all the things that I never knew about their lives and aspirations, what they were able to do and what they weren't able to do.

Years ago, the ABA’s Women in the Profession, which moved to the senior division, has a big project called Women Trailblazers in the Law. I took Judge Betty oral history in New York. Someone took mine and so on. We were talking about my mother and I said, “My mother was born ahead of her time. She was truly a genius. There's no question about it. She was professionally very successful.” She was a very well-known interior designer and an architectural consultant in New York but she was always the only woman in the room. She had very few women friends who were in the workplace. She had women friends but they were “Let's play bridge on Saturday” friends. There’s nothing wrong with that but she didn't have women peers.

It was very difficult. Whatever you and I are going through some of the things that we've been talking about, it is nothing compared to having the doors locked. You can't go on the stage. You're going to be the only woman in the room. It was difficult for her, her mother and my father's mother. I would like to know more about their lives.

We often didn't ask people about their histories like our grandmothers and mothers. It's helpful to do that. I've started to do that with my mom because I realized I didn't do that with my grandmothers either and I wish I had. I wanted to ask one last question or a closing question. What is your motto if you have one?

I don't think I have a motto. On bad days, my motto is, “This too shall pass,” which I believe was Winston Churchill's motto. I believe it was Clare Boothe Luce who said, “No good deed goes unpunished.” That's on the bad days when I'm hoping that things will move along. Generally, I don't think I have a motto. What's your motto?

Persist is one of them, for sure.

Do not be naïve. Human Resources is not your friend. They are the friends of the company that employs them.

As far as I'm concerned, that’s my motto, “Persist and do not sleep.”

Thank you so much for talking and for the things that I didn't even know. I didn't know about the details of your work, your time with then Professor Ginsburg, and your art history background as well. I learned a lot.

MC, thank you for the work that you have done and I know you will do with Legal Momentum. We are grateful to know you.

It’s an honor to work with you. All of you know what you're doing and it's always a pleasure.

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