Entering the Arena: The Spectacular History of Women at the United States Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York

ISBN: 1531513026

Author: Zornberg, Lisa

Condition: New

The first comprehensive history of women lawyers in Americas most influential US Attorneys OfficeThis book tells the spectacular history of women lawyers at the US Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). SDNY is a storied institution, the oldest federal prosecutors office in the United States and its most renowned-and a critical player in New York Citys high-stakes legal arena. But its history has been only sparsely written about, and this is the first book to share the riveting account of how SDNYs doors came to open to women lawyers. Remarkably, SDNY hired women lawyers far earlier than the Wall Street firms and other elite legal institutions. This book explores why that was. It begins in 1906 with Henry Stimsons hiring of Mary Grace Quackenbos, the very first woman to hold an Assistant title anywhere in the Department of Justice. It continues with the SDNY women lawyers who intrepidly entered the arena throughout the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II, and who overcame the strict social conformities of the 1950s, when women who entered the law were seen as social deviants. It tells the previously untold full story of how women challenged the SDNY blockade of the 1960s that prevented them from serving as criminal prosecutors. And it culminates in the 1970s-when that blockade came down and the door to womens entry was irrevocably blown off the hinges. Those SDNY women of the 70s went on to transform the bench and bar. Throughout, this book dissects and examines the close connection between SDNYs hiring of women and its legacy of nonpartisan leadership, which is what drove SDNYs emergence as an important American institution in the twentieth century and beyond.Published by the Feerick Center for Social Justice of Fordham Law School