Women Advocates before the Supreme Court, from October Term 1880 through December 2016 MARLENE TRESTMAN While writing Fair Labor Lawyer, the book-length biography ofNew Deal attorney and Supreme Court advocate Bessie Margo lin (1909-1996), I learned much about the Supreme Court careers of other pioneering women lawyers. Only by compiling a list of the first 101 women to argue at the Supreme Court did I discover that Margolin was the twenty-fifth woman ever to do so.1 That list also revealed that Margolin’s twenty-four Supreme Court arguments earned her third place among the top women advocates of her time, right behind Mabel Walker Willebrandt and Beatrice Rosenberg, and right ahead of Helen Carloss, who argued twenty-nine, twenty-eight, and twenty-one arguments, respectively. As I earlier noted, the combined 102 arguments presented by this highly regarded foursome of federal government attorneys represents almost half of all argu ments by women at the time.2 But my list of 101 women ended with arguments in April 1974, and thus it could not answer my next question: Had any other woman, in the remaining years of the twentieth century, surpassed the number of Supreme Court arguments presented by Willebrandt, Rosen berg, Margolin or Carloss? Fueled equally by curiosity and stub bornness, and using the same methodology I employed in compiling the list ofthe first 101 women, I completed the tedious yet intriguing tally of all female Supreme Court oral advocates of the twentieth century. As reflected in that tally, which accompanies this essay as Table l,31 have now confirmed that, although several impressive female advocates came close, no other woman argued at the Supreme Court prior to the October Term of 2000 as often as any of the first fabulous four. The women with the next highest numbers of twentieth-century Su preme Court arguments were attorneys Harriet S. Shapiro (seventeen), Amy L. Wax (fifteen), Beth S. Brinkmann (fifteen), Kathryn A. Oberly (thirteen), Elinor Hadley 210 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Mabel Walker Willebrandt, U.S. Assistant Attorney General from 1921 to 1929, handled cases con cerning violations of the Volstead Act, federal taxation, and the Bureau of Federal Prisons, and argued twenty-nine times before the Supreme Court. Her record as a woman advocate has been eclipsed in recent years by Lisa S. Blatt and Patricia A. Millett, who have argued thirty-four and thirty-two times respectively. Stillman (twelve), and Maureen E. Mahoney (eleven). Like my original list, the expanded list begins with October Term 1880, during which Belva Ann Lockwood became the first woman known to argue at the Supreme Court, but continues through Katherine P. Baldwin’s April 2000 argument (her fourth), at the close of October Term 1999. My expanded list identifies a total of 520 different women lawyers who presented a total of 938 argu ments during those 136 years. Having stopped my tally at the end of October Term 1999, I could only hope that some other curious researcher would con tinue the inquiry through the present. Imagine my delight when I learned, right before this essay went to print, that Julie Silverbrook and Emma Shainwald picked up the work where I left off and completed the tally through December 2016, as set forth in Table 2.4 Silverbrook and Shainwald found that, injust the first sixteen years of the twenty-first century, women argued 491 times, an amount equal to more than half of all arguments presented by women during the entire twentieth century. Our combined work reveals that, as of the close of 2016, a total of726 women have presented argument at the Supreme Court 1,430 times. The accompanying bar graph (Table 3)5 summarizes the numeric information set forth in both tallies. Up through October Term 1969, the number of Supreme Court argu ments by women reached a maximum of ten to twelve during each of only five terms. Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, the number of arguments by women remained at or above twelve per term, with the only exceptions being October Terms 1977 and 1994, during each of which the number of arguments by women dropped to nine. Indeed, beginning...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Jul 1, 2020
Janet Moore Lindman 
Open Access