In 1989, I began work on a study of the women who entered legal education as professors of law. I became interested in this subject because I was curious about who the early women law professors had been. I began by making a list of the women who had held full-time tenure or tenure-track positions at law schools that were approved by the ABA and members of the AALS before 1960, the date that I had entered law teaching. As I compiled this list, I showed it to my own colleagues, and to senior law teachers at other schools. I found, to my surprise, that very few of these early women were widely known. Those few of my male informants who had themselves worked with a woman colleague of course recognized her name, but almost none of them recognized many, or sometimes any, of the others. There was one exception: everyone knew who Soia Mentschikoff was, even if they had not known her personally. I decided that this part of our history was rapidly being lost, and that I ought to preserve it.

I presented this project at The Voices of Women Conference held at New York University Law School on April 20-21, 1990. In my paper,¹ I identified thirteen women who fit my definition of early women law professors and sketched out the context of their entry into the all-male enclave of law teaching. After the conference, I began a series of interviews of these women, their colleagues, the women who immediately followed them into law teaching, and some of their students. Then an unexpected development interrupted my research: on July 1, 1992, I became Dean of the Law School at Berkeley. For the next eight years, I had little opportunity to continue with this project. During that time, my research assistants worked on compiling a data base, using the AALS Directories, of all women law professors who fit my definition and who began teaching between 1900 and 2000. When I stepped down from the deanship on June 30, 2000, the data base was nearly complete, but it had not yet been refined. In my remarks today, I want to give you a status report on this project: what has been done, what remains to be done, and what I hope to accomplish in this study.

II. WHAT HAS BEEN DONE

A. Additional Interviews. In 1993, I received a telephone call from Wisconsin. Professor Margo Melli was retiring from the law faculty, my caller said, and they wondered whether I had anything to share with them about her career that they could mention at the retirement party her former students were planning. I was astonished. I had known Margo for years, since she and I both teach family law, but I had not included her in my list of thirteen early women law professors because the AALS Directories listed her first year in teaching as 1961. ² "No, no." the caller objected. "Margo began teaching in 1959!" A call to Margo confirmed this fact, and uncovered a fascinating story. Margo and her husband, Joe, had applied to adopt a child before she began teaching in 1959. The adoption agency, however, refused to place a child in a family with a mother who worked full time. Margo resigned from the law faculty in 1960, adopted the baby, and after the agency's misguided policy changed, was reappointed in 1961. The latter date was the one that appeared in the AALS Directories. She told me that she kept pointing out that the listing was incorrect, but the school thought it didn't matter as long as it didn't affect her seniority. ³ The listing was finally corrected in the 1997-98 edition of the Directory, after Margo's retirement. I added her to the list of early women law professors, which now contains fourteen names.

B. Completed Work. Although I had originally planned to look first in detail at the careers of the early women law professors who began teaching before 1960, and then look more generally at the women who came after them between 1960 and 2000, my deanship upset the orderliness of that plan. Two invitations to give papers motivated me to draw on some of the data from the entire period. The first was a paper about women law school deans that I presented at a working conference on Women, Justice, and Authority organized by Judith Resnik and held at Yale Law School in April 2000. In that paper, I identified the fifty-seven women who have been deans of ABA-approved law schools between 1900-2002, and discussed some of their characteristics and the characteristics of the schools that chose them as deans. ⁴

The second paper was presented as the Brigitte Bodenheimer Memorial Lecture at U.C. Davis in February 21, 2002. There I used Brigitte's position as the first tenured woman law professor at U.C. Davis School of Law as the inspiration for identifying and discussing in general terms all the women law professors in the four University of California law schools: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, and the Hastings College of the Law. ⁵ This paper enabled me to look at the entry of women law teachers over time into a single research university, and to compare and contrast the schools' treatment of their women faculty.

another group of women who occupied less prominent positions in American legal education before 1960. Some of these women held a sort of "shadow tenure" in their law schools: they taught standard law courses, but lacked regular appointments enjoyed by their male colleagues. Their job titles varied. Some were called "research associate," "lecturer in law," or even "visiting assistant professor." These classifications usually did not confer tenure-track status and frequently did not require a formal vote of the law faculty. Some of these women ultimately were admitted to the regular academic ranks, often after they had devoted their full-time efforts to the law school for many years. ⁶

Professor Elisabeth Ann Owens of Harvard was one of these women. She began her career at Harvard Law School in 1955 as a Research Associate to Professor Stanley Surrey, working in international tax. She became Harvard's first woman tenured full professor in 1972. She retired in 1981. I interviewed her at her home in Falmouth, Massachusetts on August 23, 1990. After her death on November 15, 1998, I contributed an essay based on what she told me to her Memorial Tribute. ⁷

I will examine the academic careers of the fourteen early women law professors in detail. For the larger group of women who entered legal education between 1960 and 2000, I will provide a less individualized, and more statistical overview. I plan to include more detailed treatment of several subgroups of these faculty members. While I have not yet settled on all of the groups that I plan to study in greater depth, they will include at least the following: (a) women of color; (b) lesbians; (c) women law school Deans; and (d) women who left law teaching to become judges. ⁸

¹See Herma Hill Kay, The Future of Women Law Professors, 77 IOWA L. REV. 5 (1991). Back to Text

²Id. at 10 & n.26 (listing Alessandra del Russo of Howard University Law School and Maarygold Melli of Wisconsin as having began teaching in 1961). Back to Text

³Interview with Professor Margo Melli at Wisconsin, September 11, 2000. Back to Text

⁴See Herma Hill Kay, Women Law School Deans: A Different Breed, or Just One of the Boys?, 14 YALE J. L. & FEM. ___ (forthcoming 2003) (list includes one dean who began on January 1, 2003). Back to Text

⁵See Herma Hill Kay, U.C.'s Women Law Faculty, 36 U.C. DAVIS L. REV. 331 (2003). Back to Text

⁶See Kay, supra note 1, at 9. Back to Text

⁷See Herma Hill Kay, In Memoriam: Elisabeth A. Owens, 112 HARV. L. REV. 1403 (1999). Back to Text

⁸See Kay, supra note 5, at 405 (Appendix). Back to Text