"Just Trying to Be Human in This Place": the Legal Education of Twenty Women
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"JUST TRYING TO BE HUMAN IN THIS PLACE": THE LEGAL EDUCATION OF TWENTY WOMEN t Paula Gaber Coming back afterfifteen years out of school, I sort of thought it would be the brave new world of gender rights and racial equality that it was a politically correct world and that, at least educationally, that would be how things would operate.i During my second semester of law school, I was telling a second-year friend of mine about how unhappy I was with my law school experience. She nodded knowingly, and suggested that I read an essay that had been written by two Yale students in the 1980's. Shortly after our conversation, I found and read Catherine Weiss and Louise Melling's article entitled The Legal Education of Twenty Women,2 a study of twenty women at Yale Law School. From the first sentence of the essay, which asserts that men "made American law and American law schools by and for themselves,, 3 1 felt a tremendous sense of what can only be described as relief It was exhilarating to read a description of my own experiences in the pages of a distinguished law review. The Weiss and Melling essay both validated my feelings and showed me that I was not alone in my feelings of isolation and bewilderment in the law school environment. In an attempt to try to make sense of my own feelings of alienation, I began to read more about women in law school. The more I read, the more curious I became about the extent of the problem in my own law school class. It was out of this curiosity that I decided to pursue a study of the women in my class, t Law Clerk, United States District Court, District of Connecticut; J.D., Yale Law School, 1997. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the women who generously shared their time and stories with me. Obviously, this project could not have been completed without their participation. I would also like to thank James Kindt, Sung Suk Lee, Marcia Mayfield, Giovanna Shay, Kathleen A. Sullivan, and Stanton Wheeler, all of whom were very generous with both technical and moral support. I am grateful to Dean Anthony Kronman for providing financial support to defray costs associated with this project. I. All quotations from interview subjects are taken from transcriptions of the interviews. Some sections contain more than one comment by an individual. 2. See Catherine Weiss & Louise Melling, The Legal Education of Twenty Women, 40 STAN. L. REV. 1299 (1988). 3. Id.at 1299. Weiss and Melling's observation is not so far from the literal truth. Michael Grossberg, in studying Victorian America, has argued that the law was not just one more occupation; it was a distinctive endeavor with a special place and power in the republic. And there came to be embedded in American legal consciousness an underlying premise that decreed the bar a masculine domain. Indeed, masculinity was so fundamental to the profession's consciousness that for most of the [nineteenth] century it acted as an unarticulated first principle. Michael Grossberg, InstitutionalizingMasculinity: The Law as a Masculine Profession, in MEANINGS FOR MANHOOD: CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASCULINITY IN VICTORIAN AMERICA 133, 134 (Mark C. Cares & Clyde Griffen eds., 1990). 0 Copyright 1998 by the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism Yale Journal of Law and Feminism [Vol. 10: 165 exploring the extent and possible causes of feelings of alienation. The study of women lawyers and women in legal education has already inspired a library-shelf full of articles and studies and books; these pieces take the form of narratives, statistical surveys, interviews, and histories.4 By necessity, I do not attempt to answer all questions about women's experiences in law school. I only hope to tell a story about one cohort of women, and perhaps fill in 5 a few gaps. Although my study looks at the experiences of women generally, I was particularly curious about the experiences of women on different career paths. For most people, law school is preparation for a career in law. It is at law school that most students develop their career identities. Current statistics show that women are under-represented in legal careers, and that women are particularly under-represented in the most powerful and prestigious legal positions. The lack of women in these positions can create serious consequences both for6 women in the profession and women seeking redress in the legal system. Studying women's experiences in law school, with emphasis on their career paths, I conjectured, could provide clues to the causes of the imbalance. I. THE ALIENATION OF WOMEN FROM LEGAL EDUCATION There is a large body of literature that suggests that female law students experience law school differently than male students, and feel greater alienation from legal education. The Weiss and Melling study proposed to show the "four faces of [women's] alienation: from ourselves, from the law school community, 4. See, e.g., RONALD CHESTER, UNEQUAL ACCESS (1985); LORRAINE DUSKY, STILL UNEQUAL (1996); CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN, WOMEN IN LAw (1993); KAREN BERGER MORELLO, THE INVISIBLE BAR (1986); Katherine T. Bartlett, Feminist Perspectives on the Ideological Impact of Legal Education Upon the Profession, 72 N.C.L. REV. 1259 (1994); Kathleen S.Bean, The Gender Gap in the Law School Classroom- Beyond Survival, 14 VT. L. REV. 23 (1989); Karen B. Czapanskiy & Jana B. Singer, Women in Law School: It's 7ime for More Change, 7 LAW & INEQ.J. 105 (1988); James R. Elkins, On the Significance of Women in Legal Education, 7 ALSA F. 290 (1983); Nancy S. Erickson, Legal Education: The Last Academic Bastion of Sex Bias?, 10 NOVA L.J. 457 (1986); Donna Fossum, Women in the Legal Profession: A ProgressReport, 67 WOMEN LAW. J. 1 (1981); Kathy Garner, Gender Bias in Legal Education: An Annotated Bibliography, 14 S. ILL. U. L.J. 547 (1990); Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Women's Work: The Place of Women in Law Schools, 32 J. LEGAL EDUC. 272 (1982); Cynthia L. Hill, Sexual Bias in the Law School Classroom: One Student's Perspective, 28 J. LEGAL EDUC. 603 (1988); Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Reflections on Women and the Legal Profession: A SociologicalPerspective, I HARV.WOMEN'S L.J. 1 (1978); Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Portiain a Different Voice: Speculations on a Women's Lawyering Process, 1 BERKELEY WOMEN'S L.J. 39 (1985); Carrie Menkel-Meadow, PortiaRedux: Another Look at Gender Feminism, and Legal Ethics, 2 VA. J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 75 (1994); Deborah Rhode, Gender and ProfessionalRoles, 63 FORDHAM L. REV. 39 (1994); Deborah Rhode, Missing Questions: Feminist Perspectives on Legal Education, 45 STAN. L. REV 1547 (1993); Lee E. Teitelbaum et al., Gender Legal Education, and Legal Careers, 41 J. LEGAL EDUC. 443 (1991); James J. White, Women in the Law, 65 MICH. L. REV. 1051 (1967). 5. For more on the role and importance of narrative and storytelling in legal scholarship, see Kathryn Abrams, Hearingthe Call of Stories, 79 CALIF. L.REv. 971 (199); Anthony V. Alfieri, Reconstructive Poverty Law Practice: Learning the Lessons of Client Narrative, 100 YALE L.J. 2107 (1991); Richard Delgado, Storytelling For OppositionistsAnd Others: A Plea ForNarrative, 87 MICH. L.REV. 2411 (1988). 6. Lorraine Dusky, for example, has chronicled women's continuing struggles in the legal profession as well as the injustice many women still experience as litigants in DUSKY, supra note 4, at 148-223, 249-406. 1998l "Just Trying to be Human in this Place" from the classroom, and from the content of legal education."7 Through their extensive interviews with women from a support group, Weiss and Melling compiled a moving and persuasive account of the alienation that women in law school feel. In addition to the interviews with the twenty women, the authors also presented empirical data that showed lower rates of classroom participation for 8 women. As early as 1972, Alice Jacobs collected data showing that women law students "volunteer or are chosen to answer questions much less frequently than men,"9 and exhibit an "unfortunate constellation of high achievement motivation, and real success, coupled with generalized attitudes of low self- esteem and self-hatred."' 0 Jacobs also found that women exhibited traits that "reflected a sense of being members of a minority group." 1 Her study also documented the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" double-bind that many women professionals face even today: unfeminine traits in women are perceived negatively, but exhibiting feminine traits can often be detrimental in a profession that prizes the traditionally masculine traits of competitiveness and 2 confrontation.' Over twenty years later, in 1994, a University of Pennsylvania Law School study examined academic performance data, self-reported survey data, and students' written narratives to conclude that "the law school experience of women in the aggregate differs markedly from that of their male peers.",13 The study found that despite identical entry-level credentials, women at the University of Pennsylvania Law School seem to be under-represented in prestigious positions, such as Law Review, honor societies, and research assistantships. 14 The authors attribute this gap in performance to micro- differentials in the first year that are exaggerated in subsequent years (e.g., small grade differences in the first year make all the difference in the law review selection process). The study also suggested that "women describe a dynamic in the first year."' 5 which they feel that their voices were 'stolen' from them during Similarly, a study conducted at the University of California at Berkeley Law School (Boalt Hall), contends that "[w]omen and people of color find it difficult 7.