Lizabeth A. Moody
July 29, 2009; August 19, 2009; September 18, 2009; November 2, 2009; November 16, 2009; November 19, 2009
Recommended Transcript of Interview with Lizabeth A. Moody (July 29, 2009; Aug. 19, Citation 2009; Sept. 18, 2009; Nov. 2, 2009; Nov. 16, 2009; Nov. 19, 2009), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/lizabeth-a-moody.
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Terms of Use This oral history is part of the American Bar Association Women Trailblazers in the Law Project, a project initiated by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession and sponsored by the ABA Senior Lawyers Division. This is a collaborative research project between the American Bar Association and the American Bar Foundation. Reprinted with permission from the American Bar Association. All rights reserved.
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ABA Senior Lawyers Division
Women Trarlblazers in the Law
ORAL HISTORY
of
LIZABETH MOODY
Interviewer: Ellen Podgor
Dates of Interviews:
July 29, 2009 August19,2009 September 18, 2009 November 2, 2009 November 16, 2009 November 19, 2009 Tape 1
Transcription of E. Podgor and L. Moody
This is the Women Trailblazers Project. It is July 29, 2009, and we are in Gulfport, Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I am interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
Hello.
Could you tell us where you were born? Easy enough. I was born in Johnson City, Tennessee.
And what do you recall about your early years growing up there? Well I was born in the middle of the great depression, sounds familiar now, and I was the only child of a very poor family - still recovering from the Civil War. And my father was a laborer in the lumber companies near Johnson City. Then came World War II and my parents moved to Dayton, Ohio because by that time my father had lost his job and there was no work in the Appalachian area and so my parents went to Dayton, Ohio, where my uncle had gone in advance, looking for work. I stayed in Johnson City and went to school; I lived with my grandmother for several years before I joined my parents in Ohio.
What was it like growing up with your grandmother? My grandmother was an interesting lady. She had had six children and therefore nothing really fazed her. My mother's family were involved in farming and they also had a grocery store. My grandfather died at an early age. Therefore my grandmother was responsible for the six children. Although by that time my mother's brothers had been in World War I. It was interesting; here again was an example that I think happened all over the U.S. in that the male members of the family got very good educations but the female members were overlooked when it came to college. My mother and her brothers and sisters had gone to a one room school. It was an amazing school because they learned Latin and Greek, modern and medieval history and how to write. My grandfather had insisted that they each go to school all summer learning penmanship because he wasn't going to have children who couldn't write. On the other hand my father never really went to school and could not read or write. About all he could do was the headlines in the newspapers.
What's your first memory of going to school there? I started school in the first_grade. There was no such thing as kindergartens at that time. walked to school every day. But I was a sick child. I was always catching things at school. First it was the measles, then it was the mumps and then was this that or the other thing. So mostly I stayed home and my mother tutored me through much of my early education.
1 What types of things did she tutor you on? What sort of subjects or what do you recall learning back then? Interestingly enough I learned Latin. When I got to high school they didn't really know what to do with me because I had already had Latin I, so they put me into two Latin courses, both I and II at the same time. And so I spent a long time on reading and I won some prizes for reading, and writing English literature; - all of these things I learned at home. My mother always sent away for the books that the schools used because she really didn't think that the books given out by the public schools were clean.
So where did she send for the books -- to the companies, the publishers? She would get the companies to send her the books and she paid for them. I always had my own set of books.
Do you recall the types of books you used to read? Was there any special literature that you focused on in the early years? I learned how to read with Dick and Jane. Wrong! I think a number of us who learned to read with Dick and Jane now have problems in spelling because we didn't learn phonetics, we learned Dick and Jane. I was working with a friend of mine several years ago who was the same age as I. He also had Dick and Jane. He had graduated from Harvard the same year I graduated from Yale and neither of us could spell. We were working with someone who had gone to more regional schools who said he could spell. We could not spell, despite all of our education. So I use a dictionary all the time.
During the early years were you active in any kind of activities outside of school? Generally yes. My mother was the head of the school at the church. So I learned to do speeches all of time. When I was four years old I was giving speeches at the church. Little things that I memorized. That was one of the things I did a lot. I went to church Vacation Bible School and we were, fundamentalists and we did not for example, cook on Sundays. We always cooked on Saturdays. In my grandmother's house there was always a lot of people at dinner on Sunday after church.
What was it like holiday time? Holidays were big things. Christmas was amazing in that everybody celebrated Christmas. Of course we always went to my grandmother's house with the whole family. Even on non holiday times, everybody gathered around the piano and sang all the hymns, all the Christmas carols. So it was a nice family.
And did you learn to play the piano? Not very well. I always have a piano in my house, but I did learn to play the cello. The school gave me a cello and I took cello lessons for years and years and years until I went to college and then I gave up the cello. When I was in high school I played with maybe six different orchestras. When I went to high school I had moved to Dayton, Ohio and I was very much involved in all of the high school activities. I was in the band. I couldn't play the cello in the band so I got a clarinet and took lessons. I was of course in the orchestra. I was in the theatre groups. The
2 best thing that happened to me; I was the chairman of a Junior Achievement company. We were very successful - we printed a newspaper. It was sold throughout all of the schools in Dayton, Ohio where my parents and I then lived. When I graduated from high school I received a four year scholarship. I could go to any school in New York and choose Barnard of Columbia University. My job in return for that was that I was to be the associate editor of their magazine and later the editor of their magazine that they put out for other students who were members of Junior Achievement.
Did you have any thought in your mind, back then, of becoming a lawyer? Yes. No question about it. I remember asking my father if I could be a lawyer because I'd been told women could not be lawyers. He said he didn't see any reason I couldn't be a lawyer. And I remember my first day in high school they went around the class and they said what are you going to do when you graduate from high school or college and I said I'm going to be a lawyer and everybody laughed. So that was the way it was.
Tell me a little bit about between elementary school to high school, there was no middle school then? No that's right.
And so what was it like the transition, who were you living with then and what was going on in your life then? Well I was living with my parents then. And I went in the ninth grade because there was no middle school. Although, the local school had a ninth grade and there was a great decision making process as to whether I would stay at the local school or go to the downtown high school.
And that was downtown where? Dayton, Ohio. It was an old school and to get there I took the local bus downtown, got on a streetcar, and rode to school. I did that every day.
Did you do it by yourself? Yes, or with children in the neighborhood depending on when we got on the bus in the morning. It was a local bus and of course it gets very, very cold in Dayton in the winter time. I can still remember just freezing to death waiting for that bus.
Going through the ninth grade, was there any teacher that really stuck out in your mind that was really very much of a motivator for you? I had a lot of teachers who were very helpful to me. At that time high schools were divided into college prep and other students. I was a student that they were pushing. I had very good teachers in high school, very small classes. Each year I took the state exams. At that time the state gave some sort of exams and I never really figured out what they were about, but in various subjects. I always, until my senior year in high school, took a mathematics class and I think I was the first girl who ever placed in those exams in mathematics.
3 And were there many women in the college prep section or were most of the women ... Not many. This was a school in the middle of an urban area and most of the students didn't even think about going to college. Many of the students came from poor families. There were several who did very well and did go on to college. I would say that it was not more than 10 percent of the class that went onto college.
And did you have a lot of friends? Yes, I did have a lot of friends. That was still a time if you made good grades people really sort of ostracized you. I did have a lot of friends that I went back and forth to school on the bus with them and stopped downtown for sodas on the way home and it was a nice experience. I still go back, I went to my reunion there a few years ago and it was very nice occasion to a see all of my friends. I was the only student who had graduated with a 4.0 average.
So when they went around the classroom and you said you wanted to be a lawyer, what made you say that? Because I had asked my father and he said it was o.k.
Did you know any lawyers? No. Nobody in the family was a lawyer.
So how did you come to know about the law? Well once I heard my father say, (my parents had a child who had died 10 years before I was born) "if my son had lived I would have wanted him to be a lawyer," and I said "why can't I be a lawyer?" And he said "sure you can."
And so you grew up basically as an only child? Yes.
And did you do things like ride a bike. Oh of course. My mother said she was glad when I got to be 16 and got a driver's license because she always worried about me riding a bike all over town.
Did you ride a horse? No! I tried to ride a horse a number of times and somehow or another I had never mastered that particular thing.
What was your favorite subject while you were in high school? Was it math? It was journalism.
Journalism. There was a journalism teacher, named Rosalin Young, who was my mentor. She spent a great deal of time with me and of course I was editor of the school newspaper. And she was herself, (as matter of fact she just died two years ago; she had been in the Hall of Fame in Dayton.) She wrote a column in the newspapers every day until she died.
4 What kind of column did she write? Oh, about things that were going on, and people she knew. She was really very good. She spent a lot a time with me teaching me to write and do various things. She was always after me to do this, that or the other.
Is she the one who got you involved the Junior Achievement? I don't know how I got involved in that. It's probably because I just signed up for everything.
Tell us a little bit about that? Well it was, you know there are the business men at that time, and Dayton had a lot of businesses. They went to the high schools and they got people to join the Junior Achievement groups. Because I was very interested in journalism I joined this one. We formed a newspaper and sold it around, all around town. I also had some other journalistic things - I was of course editor of the school newspaper. So I began to get a lot of experience, but one of the experiences I had, which is interesting, was that at the time that I was in high school, Erma Bambeck, who everyone remembers, was on the "Dayton Journal Herald." She had the high school column and she signed me up. I reported to her every week. I got to know her very, very well and she taught me also a lot about journalism.
But you didn't go into journalism. That's right. Everybody thought I was going to go into journalism. By that time I had thought what I really wanted to be was an international correspondent. But I read a lot.
What type of things did you read? I read biographies, I remember going to the local library once and I had a bunch of books and there was a new librarian there, who said "I don't think she should be taking these books, they are very advanced "to the senior librarian who knew me." The senior librarian said: "she can read anything." I was allowed to take the books. I read lots of British history for example. I was very interested in journalism.
Did you read a lot about law at all? To some extent. At that time interestingly enough a required course in high school was Civics. We learned about the whole constitutional system. That made things very interesting to me. I also read the newspapers. By the time we had television, my father and I watched the news every night.
So you started thinking about college. Tell us about that. Well I was thinking about college and very ambitious as to where I wanted to go. Of course my mother worked as a bookkeeper in a dairy and my father still did day work. It was clear that they couldn't afford to send me some place. I needed to have a scholarship. I applied to Miami University in Ohio because I was a resident of Ohio and it was a state university. That was sort of my fall back school but I also applied to Radcliff and several other schools in the east and ended up at Barnard.
5 What made you choose Barnard? Well as I said I got this scholarship that allowed me to choose any school in New York. There was no question that the one that fit the bill, as far as I was concerned, and my teachers of course were always advising me on this. I also had been admitted to Radcliff as well. Of course one of the seven sisters was the place to go.
Was this the first time you traveled any place? My family were people who traveled. Interestingly enough my grandfather was said to have said: "basically you should spend all you money on travel and education because those were the things government couldn't take away from you." Sounds like something we ought to be thinking about now.
You just returned from Africa, right? Yes!
Okay, now did you travel as a child? I took that to heart but my parents didn't travel much because we didn't have an automobile until after World War II. But my uncles, I had two uncles, one on each side, who had no children and they would take me wherever they were going. My mother always said that from the time I was five years old somebody would come and say you want to go someplace and I would pack my bags. My grandmother traveled a lot too. Even during the war she traveled to see her children and grandchildren.
Before you went to New York and started Barnard, where had you been? Well when I was in high school, the Civics teacher arranged a trip for us to Washington and New York. I adored New York. I was really eager to go back to New York so it all worked out really well.
What did you do in New York? Did you .... Well we went to the U.N. We had lectures. In Washington we went to see our Congressman and it was great, it was a really great thing. It changed my life.
Tell us about going off to college. Leaving your parents, having been an only child. Was that difficult? I was eager to go. And so I went off. Most of my colleagues at Barnard, about half of them, had gone to fancy eastern prep schools. A lot of others had gone to school in, the great high schools in New York. It was a new experience for me. I loved it, but it was hard.
Did you feel that your education back in Dayton was sufficient? No. I was concerned about it because I had never had an essay test before. I had always had short answer tests. I was concerned my first year at Barnard about whether or not I would do well. But I did very well. I even got an A in Botany.
6 Tell us about some of the classes you took. Well of course that was during the time when you had the system of choosing from the Chinese menu and so in our freshman year we had to take English. Sooner or later we had to take two languages. One had to be an advanced course in a language. I didn't do too well in French.
So you took French and what else? I took French and I gave up on French at some point. It was an interesting course in that again we had all the girls from the prep schools signing up for beginning French even thought they had four years of French. So I go into the French class, it was taught entirely in French. You never heard an English word in it. I didn't even know what the assignments were. The other interesting thing about Barnard was that each semester one had to take two courses in physical education. So I went through all of those courses. I took, and we had something called Greek games. It was always between the Freshmen class and the Sophomore class. Our class was one of the first classes ever to win the Greek games as Freshmen.
So what type of physical education classes did you take? We had to take Greek Games. I took basketball, some sort of female basketball. We also learned posture. You couldn't graduate from Barnard without being able to swim 11 lengths of the pool and have B posture. That was back when they took pictures of you with no clothes on and looked at your posture.
Later in life, do you think something like that helped you? Absolutely I didn't know how to swim. Again because my mother was scared to death to have me go near the water so I never learned to swim. If I hadn't had to learn to swim eleven lengths of the (pool and I could do it.) Later when I was on the curriculum committee at Cleveland State University they had a swimming requirement. I think I was the only one on the curriculum committee that supported the swimming requirement. I said "gee" I would have never learned to swim if it hadn't been required. We had all sorts of things. You could take tennis, you could take archery. I did all of these things because I never did well in any of them so I would start something new the next time, fencing, archery, tennis, golf, and South American dancing.
So you were at Barnard for four years? Absolutely.
Was there any professor there that really was monumental to you in your later career? Absolutely. There was a professor named Phoebe Morrison. I majored in government. She was my major advisor and she put up with me for four years. She wanted me to go to Yale Law School more than anything. And of course ...
She got her way! She got her way. There was the point where I changed from being a journalist to being a pre law student.
7 Vet you were taking all of the government classes. Oh yes, except that I never liked government as a major very much. So I also took lots of English courses. One of the English professors and my major advisor would devise things for me to do that were both Government and English so that I didn't get too bored with Government.
At what point did you decide you were going to apply for law school? Well as I said I was being pushed to but I didn't see any way I could afford to go to law school. This was a time when there were not a lot of scholarships to law school. So I did apply, but I didn't apply to Yale. I did have them send my LSAT score to Vale. Then I guess I had them send references and of course my professor sent them a glowing reference. About March of my senior year when I really didn't know what I was going to do. I got a letter from Yale saying "we have your references, we have your LSAT score and we have your transcripts; we would admit you if you applied." But I didn't have $50 dollars. At that time you needed $50 to apply to the law school. But when I got that letter, I somehow got $50 dollars. I don't remember to this day where I got the $50 dollars - but I applied to Yale.
And of course were accepted. I was accepted.
Now going to Barnard, money, was that an issue for you? No because Junior Achievement paid three fourths of all my expenses. Of course, my parents sacrificed a lot. I had to have money to go back and forth to New York and money for books and money for things such as a whole wardrobe full of gym clothes when I was at Barnard.
How often did you go back home? I never went at Thanksgiving, because no one ever went at Thanksgiving. At that time all of the eastern schools would meet under the clock at the Biltmore in New York. And I had some friends, some of my close friends in high school would come to Barnard, I could get them a room at Barnard. We would have a lovely time over Thanksgiving. And then I would go home for Christmas. That's the only time I went home.
8 Tape 2
This is the Women Trailblazers Project. The date is August 19, 2009, and we are in Gulfport, Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I am interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
Tell us a little bit about the Junior Achievement Scholarship and the work that you did as a result of this Award while you were at Barnard. The Junior Achievement Scholarship Program was one where they gave a full scholarship of the three-quarters of tuition, room and board to a student who would be in New York. You could choose any school in New York if you got it. What they wanted was someone who would be there. They had a magazine that they distributed to all of the Junior Achievement sections. I had this newspaper that we distributed to all of the schools in Dayton, Ohio. So that's basically how I got the scholarship. Truthfully I never applied for that scholarship. Suddenly one day I got a letter saying that I had been awarded that scholarship. My Junior Achievement advisors must have applied for me.
And while you were at Barnard, was there something you had to do as a result of getting this scholarshlp? Yes. Part of the scholarship was that I was to work with the publishers of "Achievement" magazine for two years as the Associate Editor and my last two years as the Editor of that magazine.
And so you were editing while you were in college - an actual magazine? Oh yes! And it was a good experience. There were people there who also worked for the Reader's Digest at the time. I learned a lot about publishing while I was doing that and I made a good friend who had the scholarship before me - his name was Edward Falk - and we became of course great friends and worked together very, very well.
You went through Barnard, you made the decision you were going to law school, what was graduation at Barnard like? Did your family come to your graduation? Oh yes, of course. Interestingly enough I have in my albums a picture of graduation at Columbia. Of course, Barnard is part of Columbia University. It was the women's arm of Columbia, Columbia College being the men's AB school. The other Colombia schools did not give AB degrees. But anyway they showed the graduation that year and it was the first time they had taken a panorama for the New York Times. I still, I have the whole graduation on a picture that appeared in the New York Times.
A large class? We didn't have a large class. Barnard expanded while I was there. When I started there were only a hundred and fifty students in the class. By the time I graduated there were many more students. I have forgotten what the number was - most of them were transfers from other Seven Sister schools.
1 I'll bet there are many, many successful women who were in that class. Barnard at that time had the pleasure I think and the prestige of providing more women graduate students than any other school in the United States. As you went to Barnard, you assumed that you would go to graduate school. There was definitely an assumption that you would go to graduate school. I was very lucky because when I first saw my class advisor she said to me, "I see that you are planning to take Zoology. Are you going to be a premed student?" I said, "Oh no! Oh no, I'm not interested in that at all!" She said well then I don't think you ought to take Zoology. So I took Botany.
Okay. And tell us a little bit about the summer after you graduated college and before you started Vale Law School. Well, I had no real money to go to law school. My parents would help me but they were not able to do a lot (my father didn't even have a job at that time is my recollection.) I had to find a job for the summer. I went to the Ohio Bell and spent the summer being a service rep. I went through their executive training program. It was interesting because they put service reps in their executive training program but they also had males who were really in the executive training program. Women were not to be executives. That was one of my dissatisfactions with the Bell telephone company.
Tell us about the training program. I will always remember the motto was "interested and helpful." One of the problems with the whole thing was that - you were serving as a service rep and there was always an inspector listening into your telephone conversation. I have hated telephones ever since.
Okay. So you started law school at Vale Law School. Right I had worked overtime, I worked Saturdays, I work Sundays, and I had enough money to barely get through it. I was fortunate in a way for some discrimination. Women were not allowed to live in the dormitories at Yale at the time that I went to law school there. The undergraduate school was all male and at the law school the dorms were closed to women. So the women law students either found some place to live in the neighborhood or else lived in a place called 17 Hill House which had been an old fraternity house. This was not only law students but graduate students in other areas at Yale. It was a good group of students and we all enjoyed each other and still keep contact with each other.
And so this was just a group of women who were going to law school or graduate school who were living off campus? It belonged to Yale.
It was an old Fraternity House used as a graduate residence. Then the last year I was there, they built a very shabby sort of women's residence. I got an apartment with two other law students that is where we lived the last year that we were there. But the good thing about it was that the food in the dorms was extremely expensive. If you lived in the dorms you had to take the food program. I could have never
2 afforded that. So I went over to the University Commons at Vale and had a bowl of soup for 15 cents. I haven't eaten any soup since.
Tell us a little bit about life in this residence. You had women who were in your class, how many women were in your law class? Seven.
Okay. There were always seven.
And why seven? ... 5% of 150 is 7.
So there was a quota? There was a quota.
And so you had the seven from the year before, and the seven when you were in your second year, you had the seven new ... Now the year after us there was an increase in the number of women. I think they doubled it actually. But anyway most of them lived in 17 Hill House, got to know each other, and shared the women's lounge in the law school which at one time evidently had been very, very elegant. Well the year before we got there they turned that into the faculty dining room and we were given a place in the basement. But at least we saw each other there and it was a place to sit while school was going on and so on.
So there was a lot of camaraderie between all the women in your class and the women in the class before you. Much.
Did you find that very helpful as far as like getting notes from those who were in prior classes or ... No, I often gave notes because I took very good notes and I remember once one of my male colleagues had borrowed my notes, called me up in the middle of the night, at the time of the exam. He had had them typed and he said: "there is some word here, there's a word here that I don't understand it's all through your notes." And I said: "does it of look like sort of a wiggle and an E?" Yes! I said, "That means therefore in Greek."
Let's talk about your first year in law school - so there was seven women in your class - were there any women professors? It was the first year also of the first woman professor and that was Ellen Peters. There was a very interesting situation there. I think the women students were very disappointed that Ellen did not advise the women students or work with the students. I remember we once tried to arrange a dinner with her and did have dinner with her but she was not helpful to us. But she
3 had her own problems and I didn't realize that until years later. I think a lot of us resented the fact that she had sort of not been supportive of us.
Was she the only woman on the faculty? Yes.
That must have been very difficult back then. There were women administrators, but no women faculty except for Ellen Peters; she was the very first woman at Yale. We'd all been excited about that when we first went there, but as I said I came to understand what her problems were too.
Tell us about the courses you took in law school in your first year. Well Yale, of course, is different from every other school. Its first year; the only required courses were given the first semester. Those were Torts, Contracts, Civil Procedure, and Constitutional Law. We had one of those courses in a small section which included legal writing.
And Property was not required. No.
Just like today. It was required before you graduated. In fact, one of my roommates said my senior year, "You're not going to graduate." I said, "why not?" She said, "Because you haven't taken property."
So you then took Property. Oh I was brilliant in Property! I already had seven credits in Future Interests.
So you took Future Interests before Property. That's right I went through law school backwards.
There were, there were seven of us. The first year, the really great part of the first year was you had Legal Writing with a senior member of the faculty who you also had one of the three courses Torts, Contracts or Constitutional Law. I had Fred Rodell who is a very famous constitutional lawyer for my teacher. He was mostly interested in our writing - would not let us use footnotes nor not let us use any "legalism." We were in a class of 15 and got a lot of help and information. We all used to go out to his house and go sledding and it was, it was a great experience.
Do you think you were treated any differently in law school being a woman? Sure, at that time, I did. Most of us didn't really feel that we were discriminated against. One of the professors (I remember this well), I did not take his class) - and that was one reason. If he hadn't taught it at eight o'clock in the morning I might have survived but I didn't think I could face him at eight o'clock in the morning. The story was that he one morning - there was
4 a woman a year ahead of us who was a very, very good student. And this professor (I think it was in Commercial Law) gave a hypothetical to her. She of course being very well prepared, answered quite well and so he changed the hypothetical and it went on again, she answered again and this went on and on and on until everything was exhausted and he gave another hypothetical and there was no answer to it and he looked at her and said, "What would you do?" And he said, "I know you would cry, wouldn't you?" He was exceptional. Most of the professors were really great I really did not feel at all in a minority position at Yale. I participated in everything and of course it was a wonderful experience because you either lived in the residence in 17 Hill House or lived in, the males lived in the residence in the law school so it was a family consideration. I mean law school was 24 hours a day. You talked about law, you played games with law, you all went to parties together, you did everything and, I am still very close to many of my classmates. I have been heading the program for our, my class' soth reunion which will be next month and I was the chairman of the fundraising for that and we have managed to get four million dollars.
Tell us about your activities while you were in the law school other than the law school classes. Did you participate? Oh yes.
What type of things? Of course knowing me and all of my friends, I participated in Young Republicans. It was the first time we had some legal aid program and I served at legal aid. Mainly, but basically the situation in moot court at Yale was such that your first year you did a moot court argument. Everybody did a moot court argument. And then a second year we had a competition. And then the third year, people were chosen to run the moot court program - and I was one those. So I was a moot court advisor. And there were five of us who ran the whole moot court program. No faculty member ever came near it. And every student had to participate in the moot court program. Then it was an option the second year which - I did - and so I spent an awful lot of time on moot court. Then we had wonderful lecturers there and always parties after the lectures. All of our social activities took place together as I say. We used to play Monopoly and we had our own way of doing Monopoly.
You don't want to tell us the secret of that now do you? Actually years later I was in a program, a power program that was run by one of these city programs for CEOs and at that time I was a Dean at Cleveland State. I was in the power section of that. We had to think game to play. And it was the old game of you can cheat. And my group won all of the money and I got them to give it to Women's Law Fund.
That's great. What was your favorite core subject that you studied while you were in law school? The one thing that stood out. Future Interest was probably my favorite course. As I say I had seven credits. Very few people in this whole world have seven credits of Future Interests.
5 Was there one professor that stood out more than any other professor - as a mentor? No, well yeah, you just had a whole cadre of giants and they all had opinions and they basically all taught. We sort of had a major program and my major was Elias Clark who taught Estates and Trusts. Another, and probably my favorite was Bayless Manning, who ultimately became the Dean at Stanford and who taught me everything I know about Corporations. He is still a good friend.
What would you say was the most meaningful experience you had while at Yale? Any one experience that sort of stands out? Well it was probably my first day of law school.
Tell us about it. I went to class and Contracts was a large class and I looked around and I am the only female in that class even though I had six class mates who were in other classes. And the professor came in - a really wonderful man, Fritz Kessler. He had really strong German accent and he looked around the class and of course that was a time where you did have seat assignments for the first day of class which was new to all of us. As he looked around and he came up with "Ms. Moody, what is a contract?" And I thought, "I'm going to die, right now, I'm going to die." Laughter. Somehow I made it through that. He called on me every day thereafter.
But it was all in sort of fun that he would do that. And I didn't mind at all. But as I say there I was. Everybody looking at me, "What is a contract?"
And I am sure you got the right answer. I don't think so. I think that his whole point was you'll never get the right answer.
Was there anything you read while you were in law school that was really meaningful to you, any book or any work that really stands out as something that may have motivated you later in life? Well I took a course, again sort of a journalist, again with my first year of Constitutional Law teacher, Fred Rodell, who wrote a lot of things, and he taught a course in advanced legal writing. I went to see him because I wanted to take that course and he said, "Oh Miss Moody if we take you into the class we can't meet at Mory's," which was a men's club at Yale, where he had always had his class meet. He thought about it for a minute and he said, "Oh well come to the class and we'll send out for booze." We met in the faculty lounge. It was a wonderful course because we all wrote once a week. We read our stuff aloud and was criticized for it. Of course because of my political leanings he called me Mrs. Buckley. But anyway, it was a great course. Everybody I know who took that course thought it was probably the best course they took in law school. (I had the President of Stetson say to me several years ago; "You know you write better than anybody else on the Stetson faculty.")
It sounds with the journalism background, and then working on the Junior Achievement, and then this - it probably was very significant to your writing. Absolutely.
6 Tell us about your summers while in law school. What did you do during your summers? I tried to get a job. Summer jobs were very hard to find. But I finally got a job with a concrete company. WhaJ this company did was supply concrete for people to build patios. This was a time that everybody was building concrete patios in the back of their houses and I had a job of basically figuring out how many cubic feet they needed of concrete. They'd call up and I'd find out what size they wanted and I would write out the order and I did that all summer for several summers. I had a job doing a little clerking for _alawyer in Dayton for a short period of time too. He had some interesting cases and I did research.
So you went back to Dayton each summer? Yes.
You didn't clerk in the big New York law firms? No. One of the interviewers once said to one of my colleagues - who had interviewed for a summer job, "Oh ma'am there is some mistake, what are you doing here?" And she said, "looking for a summer job." And he said; "oh ma'am we don't even hire women secretaries." So that was the atmosphere. All of us got jobs wherever we could. And one year I went to England. But that was in college. I interviewed for at job at Squire, Sanders, and Dempsey in Cleveland, Ohio but "my," they were not ready for a woman lawyer. My experience was heard by them several years and a partner said later, "The firm wasn't ready to hire a woman." "Who would I eat lunch with?"
Tell us a little bit about that. You had traveled before, you'd told us about how you love to travel and every opportunity you could get you did. Yes, I don't know again how my parents scraped up the money. My parents were wonderful people. I went to Oxford. St. Hilda's College for the summer. I met a lot of people there. Matter of fact I met a lot of them again when I started law school because we all saw each other again at Yale Law School (it was a wonderful program at Oxford). I travelled all over Europe as a result. Although my mother had told me not to leave England.
So you graduated from law school. Yes.
What was graduation like? Oh it was wonderful. Graduation at Yale is always wonderful. Again it is very ceremonial and the University graduation in which the law school participates. All of the graduates of all of the schools line up on the city square and then all of the people on the podium walk through and everybody takes off their hat. It is a wonderful experience. That was graduation. My parents of course came for graduation and we went to all of the parties.
Did you have a job lined up? When I graduated from law school? Yes. Because I was getting married that summer and my husband was still going to be in law school. So I took the Connecticut bar. [Graduation isn't the end for law students. You've still got that bar facing you.] I had a job with a law firm in
7 Bridgeport Goldstein and Peck as an associate and it was a wonderful experience. As usual, I was the first woman. Almost everybody there had gone to Yale. And I went to court every day. It was a litigation firm and all they did was litigation.
Was it difficult getting this job? Yes. At one point, I got to the point I almost agreed to teach Latin at a high school in New Haven. But I did get this job. It worked out very well except that I was leaving after the first year. I had a wonderful experience there. As I say - the first day I got there they handed me a file to go court. And that's what I did every day. They wanted me to stay.
Thank you.
8 Tape 3
This is the Trailblazers Project. The date is September 18, 2009, and we are in Gulfport, Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I'm interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
Now you worked for a short while, only a year, in the New Haven area after you graduated from Yale, and you told us a little bit about that work. Tell us why you stayed in the New Haven area. I married and my husband wasn't out of law school yet, and so he still had one year to finish law school, so I needed a job in Connecticut. Even at the beginning, the firm knew that I was only likely to stay there a year because my husband wanted to work for a large firm, but not in the New York area.
Well, tell us a little bit about Alan. I first met Alan when I was in college at Barnard and I was visiting someone else at Yale, and then I didn't see him again until he came to the law school. He graduated from Yale the same year I graduated from Barnard, but he had a Fulbright in Germany for a year, so came back to the law school when I was already a second year student. He had invited a friend of mine - Jane Moody - to a cocktail party, and I went up there and I said, I've met you before. Laughs. And so we started going around together and specifically we went to church together, with a group, every week - to the Episcopal Church. We were both Episcopalians, and that worked out very well, and so we decided to get married after I knew he was graduating.
What was it like dating a fellow law student while at Yale? Like dating anybody else; we went to football games and various other social activities together.
Okay. And so you finished with law school. You graduated and you told us a little bit about 'the first job you worked in and being given a file and told where the courthouse is. And then Alan graduated? Right.
Okay. And once Alan graduated, where did the two of you go? To Cleveland, Ohio. And it was sort of interesting how he got that job. I had been the first woman that Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, had ever interviewed. After bringing me to Cleveland, and going all through things, wrote me a letter, saying, they just didn't think I would be happy with their firm. Who would I eat lunch with? But then when Alan started the interviewing process. Squire Sanders came again to interview at the law school. I said go talk to them, that might be a good place for you and he did, and they liked him. Laughs. And he was of the right sex, so he interviewed in Philadelphia and several other places. He was offered a job at Squire Sanders and we decided to move to Cleveland.
1 Okay. And when you got to Cleveland, what did you do? Look for a job. We both took the Bar, the Ohio Bar. I had taken the Connecticut Bar and passed it the year before, and then we went and took the Ohio Bar together.
And in taking, and you passed the Ohio bar? I did indeed. I received the 2nd highest grade on the test (first woman to place).
As did Alan? Yes.
And you looked for a job? I did.
Was it difficult? Impossible, almost.
Why? Well, there were two different signs that they put on their doors. One was "We don't hire women." The other was "We don't hire women whose husband worked for a large firm."
So it was very difficult? It was very difficult. It was very difficult. Finally, I was introduced to a woman patent lawyer who had been practicing for a long time in Cleveland. Her father had been a patent lawyer, and when he died she took over their firm and was very highly respected and she said, "Oh, you're gonna have a terrible time finding a job. Why don't you come and work for me. I've got some work that you could do, not being a patent lawyer. I need somebody to help me with trials." So I did that. She said: "feel free to interview with other firms and do whatever." That was my first job in Ohio. Her name was Helen Slough and she was a wonderful woman and a great Feminist, as well.
How long did you work with her? I worked there about a year, and then I went to another firm. It was not a very happy place; it was the only place I've ever worked that I was really unhappy. I didn't quite fit in to the firm. The Senior Partner, an elderly man, was very hostile toward me. Although I did have some good friends there and I started doing corporation and securities work; so it was a good experience. But after I'd been there for a year, Helen Slough asked me to come back and work for her again; I wasn't terribly happy and she still needed somebody to do litigation. I'd also started working on trademarks and copyrights. I didn't write patent applications, but I did work on the patent cases.
And so you went back to work with her? Yes.
2 For how long was that? Two more years.
And then? Then I realized that I needed to find a new job. I was not interested in learning to write patent applications, but I was interested in business. For example, while I was working for Helen Slough, I worked on an international licensing agreement that became familiar to a lot of people in this country who were just beginning to get international licenses, and had heard that . I had worked out this patent licensing agreement. So, that's the way it went. At that point, Western Reserve had an LL.M. program at that time, so I enrolled in that to take it. Most of the courses I'd already had, but I enrolled there to take a refresher course in it also. I thought it would help me find a new job, which it did.
Okay. And tell us about the job it helped you find. Well, it was interesting. Interestingly enough by this time, law firms were really looking for people who had some background in mergers, and also in other business organizations. They were short; it was very hard to find people that did that. Of course, I had taken these courses, it was what I was interested in, and I interviewed for a number of firms. I had a number of offers. One firm (which I really wanted to go to) said they would like to hire me, except that they couldn't put my name on the door or their stationery because, after all, their clients might not like having a woman. That wasn't satisfactory to me. So instead, I had another job offer with Senator Howard Metzenbaum.
And he wasn't Senator? He wasn't a Senator then.
Right. He was just a senior partner in the law firm. I was also very friendly with the next senior partner in that firm who was Robert Krupansky; he became a federal judge, first in the District, and then in the circuit court. Now you were not in the same political party as the Senator, correct. No, Howard was a Democrat. But I was the same as Krupansky.
Okay. Our firm was about half split - half Republicans, half Democrats. It was rather funny because when I interviewed with the person who became Senator Metzenbaum, he said to me, "who did you vote for in the last election?" And I said, "Barry Goldwater." He said, "That's okay. We understand each other." And we always did; I did a great deal of his own personal work.
So, tell us about that? Because you worked very closely with Senator Metzenbaum. I did.
3 What was it like and what type of work did you do? I worked for both of the senior partners. A lot of people came to him because they wanted to either buy a business or sell a business. So we did a lot of work in that area. He attracted the clients and I and another partner - I became a partner quite soon after I went to that firm - worked on those cases.
Was it easy to become a partner at a law firm? I think I was probably the first woman to become a partner at a sizable firm in Cleveland. There were a few other women who were practicing, mostly with a member of the family or with a government agency or being a secretary or a librarian.
So, that was rather unique at that time? Oh, yes! The years I spent at the Metzenbaum firm were wonderful years. I worked very hard, and enjoyed myself and working with the people that were there. It was a small firm. We had twenty-two people. And we got along very well, except when we set each other's salaries; the blood flew under the door, and then we agreed to something and that was that. We were all friendly again. Laughs. It was a very good place to work, but then at some point during that time I started teaching as an adjunct in Cleveland State. Cleveland Marshall Law School had just become part of Cleveland State University. So, once a year I would teach, usually corporations. I also taught trusts, civil procedure and "Equity." Oh, I taught equity. Not many people teach that anymore.
So, the courses that you taught as an adjunct, it would be one course a semester? Yes.
And you were still all of this time working for Senator Metzenbaum? Right.
Was not Senator yet? Yes.
All of us in that firm were quite political. My husband was the President of Young Republicans in Ohio. That's really probably why I didn't end my career there. During the Senatorial campaign, it became very hard when I didn't have the Senator there. People were questioning why I was there - my husband was a Republican and my partner was a Democrat. It seemed easier to me at that time, I was invited to come full-time to the law school. I said maybe I could come as a visitor. I had also been doing some cases involving women work (pro bono).
Well, tell us a little bit more about working in the law firm. How many years did you work there? I think I worked there five years.
4 Five years, all doing business work? All doing business. I did litigation that came out of the business. The funny thing was what I ended up with there. One of my partners did a lot of labor work- the firm did a lot of labor work - although I hardly ever did that. There were several cases involving women's rights, coming out of the labor work, and they insisted on having a woman lawyer to represent them. It turned out that I was representing them, and that was of course quite interesting and at the same time, I and some other people had formed Women's Law Fund. It started out as WEAL (Women's Equity Action League). I was their 2"d President that's still going on I think. But it split at some point and the people didn't want to do litigation, they were wanting a women's rights organization. One of the things that was interesting was that many of the women that they wanted to attract were Roman Catholics. We had a number of judge's in Cleveland who were Roman Catholics. Actually, Helen Slough was a Roman Catholic. Of course, they were against abortion, so we said we're not gonna do anything to do with abortion. We're gonna do education, insurance, and employment claims in order to be sure that we could attract those women. They changed that some· years later after I had left. It left me a stigma when I was about to be nominated as a Federal judge by the Republicans.
Because of your association with them? Because WEAL had become, at that time, a part of the abortion group. So, everybody said "look, look she was the President of this organization". It was a bad political background for me, for that job, although I had nothing to do with it.
So, when you were in the law firm you started the organization. You were also working and doing business work. Were there many other women who practiced law in the business area during that time? No.
Most of the women did what kind of work? Family work. One of the large firms had a woman partner who did only what we called 'blue sky' work for them. But for the most part by that time, there were beginning to be some women. I remember I told my husband about his firm, that it would be ten years before they ever hired a woman, and it was exactly ten years. I remember his coming home from a firm meeting and saying "you were right, we have done it! We have hired a female lawyer." Now they have hundreds of females. There were various other organizations. Cleveland really became a center for women's rights, interestingly enough. There were a number of women lawyers who became judges, and we were all very active in women's organizations with respect to women's rights. I belonged to most of the organizations. Back to the representing the labor unions, I had several cases from my firm that involved discrimination against women and labor, getting labor cases. One of those cases was the case that struck down, in Ohio, the protective laws, which was an important thing. It was sort of sad because the protective laws looked like good things and there was a real problem with women who had been active in getting protections for women who worked in an industry. But of course, when they passed the Civil Rights Bill it began to protect women out of jobs. So, we had to do something about the protective laws because they were really causing women not to be qualified for jobs.
5 Let's go back to the law firm for a little bit. Tell us about what it was like working with Metzenbaum? He was great. He was a great friend of mine. I worked on his personal work, as well as things for the firm.
What was it like during the election? We were busy. During the election as I say, by the time I had removed myself from the firm, because my husband was involved the other way. Although, I think my husband probably voted for Howard - he was a good friend of ours. I had some very interesting cases with Senator Metzenbaum. One of my favorites was the fact that he at some point bought a European soccer team and I was doing all of the legal work for this European soccer team. The firm would go down to the soccer games. We were the only people there. It was really interesting. Soccer had not come into its own in Cleveland yet, and I think that we would be there sitting about ten of us in this stadium, that had 85,000 seats. Laughs. So, he realized that the soccer team was not the most socially acceptable to people in Cleveland. Laughs. But we were very busy, and did a lot of interesting things in that firm. I laughed when he told me that I was going to be a partner. He said "you know I worried that maybe the clients might not like you as a woman. But I've had no problem from you, that's the not the same that I've had from the males who are your age." So, we were always very good friends, and I worked also with Robert Krupansky, mostly on litigation.
And tell us about Robert Krupansky. Robert Krupansky was a political figure in the Republican Party, and had been the Commissioner of Liquor in Ohio. While I was there, he was appointed attorney for that federal court, and so left the firm. It clearly set him up for being a judge; he became a very good judge. But I did have some very interesting cases; mostly cases involving what I call 'business divorce'. Those cases are just like divorces - the people have real problems, they call you in the middle of the night because they're so nervous. [His sister Blanche was a lawyer and a judge of the Ohio Supreme Court.] In fact we did have one case where our client was so nervous, that I had said to my partner we were about to settle the case and he had asked me what I thought of our settlement. I said well, not the greatest settlement in the world but I think that our client just can't stand it anymore and he died the next day. Worst experience I've had in the practice. The typical scenario for those cases, we still have them, is you'll have two people who have been in business together for a long, long time. They've gotten along well; the partners are major shareholders and then one of them brings his son-in-law into the business, and then the business brakes up. One of them leaves, but forms the same business that the other one had. Then one of them sues, and it's a very nasty business. It's just like a personal divorce.
So you decided to make the jump into legal education? Yes, but I was just going to stay there for a year.
6 ...
Tell us about that. How did you come to go to legal education, in the first place? You'd been adjuncting? That's right. That's how I got into it. I'd always been interested in teaching, but I went there because as I just sort of needed to get away from the law firm; there was more politics going on in the practice of law in my estimation. So, I agreed with the Dean that I would come for a year.
Had the Dean approached you? Yes. The Dean called me one day and said would I come; they needed somebody to teach and so I had been suggested. And I said "oh, no I'm too busy; I couldn't do that." Then the next day it's funny. It's what I call the snide way of doing things. I was furious because I had a case that needed to be filed because the statute of limitations was going to pass. So, I told my secretary to get a check and go down to the federal court and file this case. She came in and said the accountant says that she's too busy with the Senate campaign. I was furious! I gave her the money and said go file the case. I was seething when the Dean called me again and said would I reconsider it and come to the law school, and that's when I said, let me come up there for a year, and of course I stayed. I enjoyed teaching. I had also become very active in women's rights litigation and became counsel for J. Carol LaFlear a school teacher who had been put on unpaid leave because she was pregnant.
So you were a visiting Professor for a year? Yes.
Okay. And what did you teach in that first year of full-time teaching? Well, that was really surprising. It's interesting, people who go into academia don't really know what the rules are and nobody tells you. It never occurred to me that I would teach anything other than corporations. And I got my class schedule and I was teaching trusts, negotiable instruments, and equity. We were on the quarter system then, and I doubled on all of those courses. But there I was. Actually, I wrote a book on trusts and e~tates that year. Just to learn something about it while I taught it.
Did you enjoy that first year of teaching? I did very much, and decided that I would stay in it. I was invited to stay.
And you made the jump, into the academy? That's it.
And what courses did you then start teaching? Corporations. I once took a lot of books down to the Dean some years later, and said "I don't teach everything in law school. I want you to take these books. They are courses that I'm not gonna teach." I taught a general intellectual property course. I had a lot of experience in intellectual property. I taught the Uniform Commercial Code, and I taught corporations. Those were where my main ones, but of course I had taught trusts and wills in the mean time.
7 You were the utility infielder? Absolutely.
And wherever they needed to put you, you were gonna teach that course? Right.
Were you the only woman on the faculty? No, I was not. There was another woman who later became a federal judge, which was Judge Ann Aldridge, [now deal.] She's a senior lawyer now, and is a great friend of mine. I had been offered a full-time job, before, I turned it down, and she was hired and came to the law school.
Was she the first woman at the law school ever? To have a standard appointment, yes.
So, you were the second? And of course, there was the woman librarian, who was a lawyer. Who had been there for a longtime.
Alright. Were you on the tenure track? There was an issue about the tenure track including me and several others. It was interesting; again, I'd never knew anything about the tenure track. I was just used to working a job.
You just went to your classes and taught, right? Yes, and well, interestingly enough I one day said, "You know it didn't bother me when I was an adjunct that I didn't get paid, but I haven't been paid since I've been here." The Associate Dean said you have to go up to the University and collect your paycheck. They probably have a stock of paychecks for you. I said I thought now I needed to work for money; but I really did enjoy teaching.
8 .,
Tape 4
This is the Trailblazers Project. The date is November 2, 2009 and we are in Gulfport, Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I am interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
We were talking about your beginning years teaching at Cleveland Marshall Law School. Can you tell us a little bit more about the first few years in teaching, and what it was like to move up through the tenure process? As I think I said the last time, is that I sort of got to Cleveland Marshall on a temporary basis. I was appointed as an associate professor, so I didn't really have much further to go in the tenure process. Interestingly enough, they had a rule at Cleveland Marshall that if you were an associate professor tenure went with it, but then they decided that for a number of us that had come at the same time, no tenure. There was a huge battle over this actually. But, I went through the tenure process and I'd already written some things and so it went very well. The next year I got a promotion to full professor and tenure.
Tell us about some of your early writings, your scholarship. Well, I did a number of things, in my early writings. A lot of them involved women because I did a lot of speaking more than really writing at that time. I became known for being a Feminist and people would invite me to come to speak. Did I tell you about the time I went over to a chapter of The Association of University Women in the western part of Ohio?
Tell us about that. This was a funny thing. I was invited to come; one of the school's in western Ohio had a fairly large chapter of the Association of University Women. They had a fairly good size auditorium and the hostess came to me and said that they had invited me because they thought I would be someone interesting enough for the people to come and listen. They had never been able to change their bylaws, and they had a majority rule for a quorum and of course they never got a quorum. It was a large organization, and they thought that I would be a little strange that they would have more people come and this was confirmed by a woman who came up to me and said, "I always wanted to see what one of you feminist people looked like." Laughs.
Laughs. Did you think of yourself as a Feminist at that time? Yes. Always. In the late 60's we formed an organization called WEAL, Women's Equity Action League, in Cleveland. It was basically designed because we wanted to do litigation, and we did not want to get involved in the abortion controversies, which other organizations were involved with. And we wanted to attract a number of Roman Catholic women who would be opposed to our being involved in that. We had some women judges, some very well known women in Cleveland who joined WEAL. And I became President of it at one point. We continued to talk about doing some litigation and we had a school teacher to come and see us. And she was concerned because she had been notified by the principal of her school that since she was pregnant, at the end of three months she must take an unpaid leave until the baby was a year old. We thought that was a pretty good case and we started working on that case and we used WEAL to start that case and followed it all the way to the Supreme Court. It was of course the
1 ,...._ r
LaF/eur case. That's when we met Ruth Ginsburg, who became one of our Trustees. We had falling out over a number of things with WEAL so those of us who'd been working on the LaF/eur case. They formed a new organization and that was Women's Law Fund. It's interesting the way that we got money for our Women's Law Fund; it was funded by the Ford Foundation at a very high level. We had done the Lafluer case and it won in the Supreme Court on due process, not on equal protection, unfortunately. We also at the same time were interested in forming a clinic at Cleveland State, and Jane Moody Picker a class mate at Yale Law School who had been working at Squire Sanders & Dempsey in Cleveland came to the law school to form the clinic for the Women's Law Fund. Of course, she became a professor and a full professor.
Were you a professor at this time or had you moved into the Deanship? No, I was a professor. I actually when we started Lafluer I was still practicing law. My firm was very supportive of my fight against women's inequality. One of our secretaries did almost all the typing for the case (pro bono). Of course one of the great things was that we did not have money for anything like depositions or anything. All the lawyers were volunteer, pro bono, but other things were not pro bono, like transcripts of discovery, and so we were having a hard time funding that. When we finished the Lafluer case and won interestingly enough our opponent, Charles Clarke lawyer at my husband's law firm, who lost the case went to the Cleveland Foundation and said, "You know these women are very good lawyers, and I think you ought to help them." The· Cleveland Foundation said they needed a lot more money than we could produce, but the Cleveland Foundation then went to the Ford Foundation, and we were funded for Women's Law Fund for about ten years.
Tell us about the formation of the Women's Law Fund. Well, that was very easy, because I formed nonprofit corporations, as you probably know.
That was your area of expertise? By this time, we were getting to know the women who were interested in litigating Women 1 s Rights. A woman in Michigan, a lawyer Jean King was one of the people who was really forward in a set area, and we got some of the people who had been involved in the University of Maryland feminist activities and Ruth Ginsburg, who at that time was heading the Women's Project for NAACP. That was how we got started. I drafted the articles of incorporation and bylaws and the interesting thing, however, was that we had a terrible time getting a tax determination that we were a 501(c)(3), and basically if it hadn 1 t been for Senator Taft from Ohio - who was a friend of mine - we would never have gotten it. The IRS had put it in a bottom drawer. The IRS was having real problems with giving charitable law firms exemptions, and we weren't going to get a dime from the Ford Foundation until we had that piece of paper. We did get it finally with a little congressional help, and started the Women's Law Fund and at the same time we started the clinic at Cleveland State and so the two were more or less merged. Then we began a series of litigation, litigation with respect to women in sports in the schools. We did litigation with respect to some insurance problems. We tried to limit what we were doing to education, insurance, and employment and stay out of the social kinds of things. We took a lot of cases. I had some other cases that came to my law firm from one of the unions
2 that wanted us to represent them, and they wanted a woman to represent them, the partner who was in charge of labor matters, which was not my field, volunteered me. One of the cases that I had with a lawyer in Philadelphia, a woman lawyer, involved the protective laws. I may have said before, that the protective laws were a problem, because the people who had been involved in getting voting for women had been also involved in getting the protective laws passed. These were things that required certain hours of the day and restroom breaks and things like that. But, it turned out that the wheel had turned and what they were doing was protecting people out of work. I remember going to a company that you'd recognize. It made small appliances in Mansfield, Ohio. We went through a lot with that, and they had an F seniority chart and an M seniority chart. The F people were the last hired, and the first fired. That's where I learned a lot about women in labor unions as one of the problems that they had. What I found out was that for everybody the problem wasn't so much the pay, it was seniority because they would be laid off, and then they would have to start all over again the seniority, if they came back, and so this became a big issue for us. We did some work with the fire department; one of my favorite cases.
Tell us about it. A case where we were challenging the rules of the fire department in the suburb of Cleveland, and the Chief got on the witness stand and said they had to have rules that said that you couldn't be under 51 811 to be a fireman because firemen had to look powerful. I knew we were going to win that case because the judge that was trying the case was sitting behind the bench with his feet up on a stool.
Knowing your audience. Oh, yes!
Let's go back to the school - You rose to full professor eventually. Very shortly after.
And you were doing some writing. What was it about? I did some writing in women's rights. I did quite a lot of writing on the one-sex school, where which I made some female enemies. In 1974, I was appointed by the Ohio Supreme Court and was one of the first commissioner's to the Ohio Public Defender Commission which I served for 7 years. I drafted many of the rules adopted by the Commission.
Why? I was in favor of the one-sex school having gone to Barnard, which is still a one-sex school, and I felt that with the way things were that women did better. Many of the women at the head of the movement at that time had gone to the Seven Sister schools.
That really gave them training in leadership and other things that they didn't get if they were in a co-ed school. You maybe got to be secretary of the organization, but you never got to be the head of it. At Barnard we had a lot of training in Feminism, and so that was a good thing. Well, then after we did have these cases, and my writing was on various Feminist activities. I also
3 wrote them on corporate activities and non-profit corporations, but of course that tied in with a lot that I was doing in women's things. So the two went together. Then at Cleveland State, we organized the Women's Law Fund and fortunately, we got a place for Women's Law Fund in a building, right next to the law school. We had the law school where the clinic was and then we started doing these cases in the clinic.
In the clinic, were you actually working as the professor in the clinic? No, Jane Picker was the professor
Did you help out at all? Oh, yes. We would get cases -- we had a number of cases. I also did a lot with affirmative action in the university. I knew that I was on the search committee for our affirmative action officer who was a real feminist.
I assume that was a new position when you were looking for affirmative action officer? No, it wasn't.
Or had you had one? Because the affirmative action officer not only was going to be for women, it was going to be for minorities as well, and so we often cooperated with the NAACP, for example, in cases where the problems were similar.
Did you find as a professor in the law school that they would pull you away to be on a lot of committees? Oh, yes!
Tell us about that. There were two women professors in the law school. Judge Ann Aldridge, (she became judge after that) had been the first woman on the faculty, because at that time I had turned down the job. Then I was the second and so then she and I were good friends at the law school, but I was on every committee. There was the one on whether or not you had to have swimming as a requirement for the university. There were lots of things. I remember that I was on a committee that was beginning to look at technology and I said, I had to have something for the law school and I said we need computer research. It was just when OBAR was beginning to be formed and it turned out that my husband had been assigned by his firm to work on it because; a partner the president of the Ohio State Bar at that time was forwarding computers and legal research. My husband and I went up to the ABA Annual Meeting. I think it was in Montreal, was where the ABA's annual was that year. They were demonstrating this and we were the people who decided that it would be a full-text system. After OBAR got established, I went to the representative in Cleveland and I said, "You need to do something for law schools, because if you don't teach people how to use computers in law schools then you're not going to have anybody able to use computers." But I said, "We can't afford to spend $18.00 an hour doing this." And that's how we put the whole thing together, and so Cleveland State and the Case Western Reserve were the first two schools to have OBAR, which later became Lexis.
4 .~
Tell us about some of your involvement with the Cleveland Bar Association? Of course, I was very, very active in the Cleveland Bar Association, and it was interesting because I was nominated for the Board of Trustees - the first woman to be nominated for the Board of Trustees. They had never had an election before, which was contested. I lost that election. So, I was invited shortly thereafter to be· on the Board of Trustees. I was elected that time, but I still wanted to pay them back. I finally became the first woman President of the Cleveland Bar Association.
What was that like? It was good. I had lots of friends and I was very well received in that job, although at first when I first indicated my interest in it, because by that time I had been on almost every committee of the Cleveland Bar Association. When I first went to Cleveland, they wouldn't appoint a woman to a committee, but somehow or other some friend of ours got to be president, so he appointed me to the CLE committee and from there on, I went through all the committees. So, I thought that I was well qualified, and a lot of other people did too.
And so you were teaching and you were active in the Bar. You were active in the Women's Fund, but you continued to rise in the law school. Did you take an administrative position at some point in the law school? I became popular with some of the other departments in the university, and so I became a powerful person in the University. I was elected as the representative of the faculty to the Board of Trustees. Also at the University, I became the Chair of the Committee on Faculty Affairs, which was the most powerful committee at the University. We basically looked at all the contested tenure and there again we got involved in the feminist activities. In fact we had a very important case, and Women's Law Fund took the case on behalf of a person who was turned down for the chair of department clearly because she was a woman. We brought suit and she got a million dollar verdict, and I testified. Somebody said, "You're not gonna be popular with the University." But I testified. During the last part of the 1970's I had two positions of confidence. One was the AALS in 1974 I was elected and served for 6 years to the Executive Committee. I was not the first person to be on the AALS Executive Committee, but it was about the third one. The other important position was the US Reviewing Commission which was the body which enforced "Title Four." I was appointed by the President of the US. One of the interesting cases was the law school of the University of Texas I had the pleasure of signing the order terminating Texas federal funding because of sex discrimination in the law school.
There were a number of other things, as a matter of fact, we had a provost appointment and I was the Chair of the Provost Committee, and I found a wonderful person who I thought would make a tremendous provost. The Chair of the Board of the Trustees was heard to say, 'Tm not going to have a broad to be the Provost of the University." And later I was nominated as the President of the University. There was a lot of that kind of talk.
Well, tell us about rising from a professor to becoming Dean at the law school. Well, I became the interim Dean. I was on every committee.
5 Because they didn't have women on a lot of the committees, was that it? That's right. The University committees, the law school committees.
So, you knew everything at the law school. I never did Admissions. I was Chair of the Faculty Appointments Committee. I traveled all over the country looking for women often. We began to look for women and hire women. So that was a very important part of my work. Then Dean, just because I was the person who was there.
Tell us about becoming interim Dean, what happened? Well, I was on the Dean's Advisory Committee. I was a very good friend of the Dean. We hired a Dean, which was very unpopular with the faculty and he decided to leave. It was interesting because I had voted against him, and some years later he said, "Liz, you're the only person I trust." He said, "All the people that were all for me and this that and the other, there is no way to keep them satisfied. They want payback all the time." He said, "You never really wanted to be paid back and you were always somebody who said what you thought." But then we had another Dean who I had practiced law with in Cleveland, and then he had gone to SMU as a professor, and then he came to the law school. And again, I was very close to him, and that's the probably the way I came to be the interim Dean. I was the Chair of the Dean's Advisory Committee.
Did he step down as Dean? He's now President of the University of Baltimore. And he left the law school to become the President of a drug company.
They suddenly needed a Dean and who appointed you as interim Dean? The President and the Board of Trustees.
How long were you interim Dean, before you became Dean? A little over two years.
And the faculty voted for you to become the Dean? No vote.
I turned it down. Steve Smith was hired, but at the same time, I became the President, Executive Director and CEO of Law School Admissions and Services and Law School Admissions Council.
That's the LSAC? I went off to Princeton. (The LSAC Offices were in Newtown, Pennsylvania) I stayed there for three years. That was a very interesting job, and there again, we did a very important study while I was there that included women, and we were also concerned with some studies that we did on women and the LSAT. So, that was again, a good place to some good work for women.
6 You were there for three years and then you came back? I came back to Cleveland State. And I had ju.st been there two or three months when somebody said to me at a party, "Liz, would you be Dean again?" I said, "Oh, nasty job! Nasty job!"
7 Tape 5
This is the Trailblazers Project. The date is November 16, 2009, and we are in Gulfport, Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I'm interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
We talked about your time at the LSAC. You then went back to Cleveland State. Tell us about going back to Cleveland State after working and heading up LSAC. Well, I had never planned to do anything differently. I agreed to go to LSAC for a time, because I had been very involved with LSAC as a trustee and the chair of their audit committee. They were at a point of topsy-turvy kind of activities. So I had volunteered, pretty much, to go there and try to straighten everything out, and I'm very proud to say that, when I left there were no more footnotes in the balance sheet_, and that I've had a very good time there. I thought we did something for women too during the time I was there. By that time I had become very involved in the American Bar Association first as Chair of the Nonprofit Corporation Committee and the Chair of the Drafting Committee of the 1988 Revision of the Model Nonprofit Corporation Act.
We did a very large research project, which was called the Bar project, but never really had anything to do with the Bar. It dealt with the admission of people over the last five years and we used many law schools as samples for that. It was a very well done. We had very good people on the staff at the LSAC. It was interesting because it was my first experience after I had graduated from law school of not working mostly with lawyers. I was working with logicians and people who did testing work. I think I had general counsel and associate general counsel, and that was our legal staff there - and one of our vice president's was a lawyer. It was a period of change and we had just changed the scoring of the LSAT and that made everybody upset over the fact that the scores were not the same as they were. In fact they went back to that scoring the old scoring level; now it's at 180 again.
It was a good time, and as the Executive Director I met with the officers of the ABA Section of Legal Education, and the ALS section - we met together. It was again an exciting time because of forming the Law Access Loan Program, which was a new thing for us and hoping to cut down a little bit on students cost for loans. I think we accomplished a lot of what we were doing there. Eventually, I was the one who led the organization into splitting up the loan program and the admissions program. We were, first of all crowded in space in Newtown, so we needed to go someplace and it seemed logical to split up those two organizations because the people that each hired were very different. That's the last thing I accomplished while I was there. It was really reorganizing, which is one of the things I like to do of course reorganize nonprofit organizations or organize them, and so that was fun. But I was glad to go back to my friends in faculty at Cleveland State.
Well, I'd been in Cleveland State before I was one of the first full professors and a woman at Cleveland State. I was very much involved there with academic activities. It was also a time that the whole idea of women's rights was really focusing in Cleveland. One reason, for that was that Cleveland at one time was the third city in the country with the most executive offices of Fortune 500 companies, and therefore it was a good place really to do litigation. I've already
1 talked about doing litigation through Women's Law Fund (really, I think, the first women's organization to do a great deal of litigation including, of course, the case of pregnant schoolteacher case, which freed up literally millions of school teachers who had been let go when they became pregnant).
I was also very active in governance at Cleveland State. There were a lot of women's activities involved with that, at Cleveland State, because I was the chair of the University Wide Faculty Committee one year. I was also the Faculty Representative to the Board of Trustees, and women's rights issues arose all the time. I had been on the search committee for the affirmative action officer in Cleveland State, and we had a woman who was extraordinarily good. We did a lot of activities, and one of the things that did come out there was a very important case involved the fact that a woman who had been chair of the business school, applied for a position as provost. There was a lot of fancy footwear to keep her from it; her own people had voted unanimously for her in this position and she ultimately did sue the university years after that, it took years for it. A Women's Law Fund volunteer lawyer took the case but on a for-pay basis, a contingent fee really. The faculty member did get a settlement of over a million dollars.
So, you saw a lot of changes from when you initially came to Cleveland State and then were Interim Dean and then left there and then came back. Did you see an improvement of the status of women throughout that period of time or? Right, and I was able to help a lot of women. I know that a woman who is now Dean of another law school had interviewed with me for a counsel position at Law School Admissions Service, and I didn't feel that she really fit into that position, but that night after talking to her, she expressed her interest in teaching. She said well, she would get a job for a few years and then go to teaching - we've all heard that.
I called the Dean at Cleveland State and we had been looking for someone for a position that she would fit into beautifully. So I called the Dean - we were very close friends - and said "look I interviewed somebody today that you want to talk to, she was from Ohio. She had been on the governor's committee that had dealt with women in prison and did a magnificent job on that in Ohio." I said "call her up!" He called her the next day, she came and was interviewed. She did very, very well at Cleveland State and of course got tenure and full professorship and was an Associate Dean I think. And now is at another law school as the Dean. I was very proud of that. I remember sitting at the ALS some years ago, waiting to get into my room in the hotel and everybody came up and said; "you helped me, you did something for me." One of our professors' that I was very close to and helped out, had been on our faculty for many years. She became federal judge and we were very active, the women in Cleveland, in getting her that position. In the meantime, I had also had become very active with other women's organizations in Cleveland. There was an organization called Women's Space. I received various awards; one of the awards was for women's activities. On that day the City of Cleveland declared a Lizabeth A. Moody Day.
2 Tell us about that. It was wonderful. I had received the award and the Mayor came and said, "This is Lizabeth A. Moody Day." I got a poster, and it was very exciting to have a day named after you. And then I was given the Ohio Bar Medal, which was the highest honor that could be given for the practice of law in Ohio. I treasure that very much. I was also chosen by "Cleveland Magazine" as one of the Cleveland's most powerful women.
And with all of the things you accomplished there, you did eventually leave. Yes.
And you went to Stetson. That's right.
Tell us about that. Well, somebody said to me at a cocktail party, "would you be interested in Deaning again?" And I said, "No, no, bad, nasty job." I said, "Well, come to think of it, I would consider a deanship, at a school that was a private school." I had felt like I had been beating my head against the public school problems for a long time. I've been trying to build a library there for example, at Cleveland State. It would go in and out of the legislature. I would lobby for it and so on. I said if it were a private school in Florida - it had been very cold in Cleveland that winter, and so the issue came. Then I was offered an interview at Stetson, and then they offered me that the deanship. My husband and I had to think about this for a long time. But Easter Sunday came and we always have had a large party at our house in Cleveland on Easter Sunday, and all of our friends came, and they were all were wearing fur coats and boots and this was the middle of April. It was not an early Easter and snow was everywhere and my husband said, "We're going to Florida."
So that's how I got to Stetson.
Now Alan at this time was practicing law at a firm. Yes, he was.
How did he work it? Well, he had practiced there for a long time, and I was gone a lot. I visited, I think, I visited one year in Toledo for the whole year. I visited at George Washington. I visited at Hawaii. So, he was used to my being gone for a while, and he was also in bad health at the time, but his firm had promised him. (A promise on which they reneged on) that he could start, a practice branch of the firm in Tampa. That did come about later, but by that ti~e he was quite ill, and unable to take part in it. So, he ultimately did retire.
3 The visits that you had throughout your years in George Washington and Toledo. Do you think that helped you, as an academic or as a dean eventually, to have experience with different law schools? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the more experience you can have the better. The other thing that I did for years was inspect law schools for the American Bar Association, and I think I counted up thirty-five or forty law schools that I had visited over the years, usually as the Chair of the inspection committee. That was also invaluable to me to see because schools are different; they have different goals. I always enjoy meeting people, when you visit you get to know other faculty members, so I had many contacts all over the country.
So, you visited, you saw things at many different schools, you'd seen the process of LSAC and all the inspections, and then you came to Stetson. No, I was still doing inspections, when I came to Stetson.
Yes. What was your vision when you first came to Stetson? Well, I had not been on the inspection team, but during their last inspection, the team made the statement that Stetson, I forgot exactly how it was stated, but anyway, that Stetson was still back in the 70's, as a law school.
You were going to bring it forward? Yes, and I had hoped to make some changes. I think at the Hall of Fame I shared with a student and the people there, the story that I had just been here a few weeks and I went home at night and I was very discouraged because I was getting bad reports from the faculty - they didn't like some of the changes I'm going to make, and I voiced this to my husband, he said, "They should have known what you were like. When you visited Stetson to be interviewed you changed all the furniture in the guest suite!"
What kind of changes did you make at Stetson? Well, I made some curriculum changes. I changed a lot in connection with students. When I came here there was one student organization that was the student government, but it was really wasn't very active. I think now, how many do we have?
It's an incredible number now. I was able to hire an Assistant Dean, who was just wonderful at getting students involved in the ABA and all sorts of activities. Then we had the best Student Bar Association in the country for several years. I've always been concerned about curriculum and still am, and I did something's with curriculum. One other thing is I cut out two-hour courses. Now, we're about to have two hour courses again soon, but things don't ever really change. They just repeat themselves with some difference. I begin to start hiring people to fill in gaps that we had, and with experience at other law schools. I brought quite a few visitors, for example, one of the visitors that I was able to bring was the former President of the Association of American Law Schools, who stayed with us for a year.
4 Who was that? David Vernon.
That's all right.
That's okay. He was very good.
Then, I was interested in the law library.
Yes, tell us about the new law library. I've always been interested in law libraries, and so they had been told by the American Bar Association that they had to do something about the library, that it was atrocious, and it was. It leaked and everything. They decided that maybe what they would do was build a building on campus and just tear down the old library and put it back the square that it was and up again. One day I was standing outside of my office, and I looked over and saw this empty parking lot and I thought, we can build a library over there, and that way we won't have to have a temporary library for two years. We'll have plenty of room to do that! So, we built the library. We paid for the library. Of course I had a lot of decanal functions. I was also, at that time, the chair of the Accreditation Committee of the ABA.
Oh my gosh. And I was very active in getting our program started for international programs for the summer. I was also interested in a night program.
And you brought in some phenomenal speakers. Yes.
At Stetson while you were here. Tell us about some of those speakers. A Supreme Court Justice. I brought in Ruth Bader Gennesberg with whom I had been associated for years in Feminist activities, and who still is a good friend of mine. She came for the dedication of our library. We've had a lot of people. We had a Justice from the Supreme Court of New York, various ABA presidents and the mayor of Miami Beach.
And all people who were interested in legal education. We had a lot of good speakers.
So, you were balancing being Dean of the law school, and also still continuing to be very active at the ABA. Oh, yes.
5 And doing site visits still? Oh, I was doing site visits all the time. As a matter of fact, I taught in the courses for training site visitors as well. As a matter of fact, the first day I came to Stetson, I left several days later to go to Bratislava to teach there in the Cleveland State summer program. I've always said that, that I had spent thirty days in Bratislava, which was twenty-nine days longer than I cared to.
You did inspections all over the world, I know that. Yes. China.
Israel. Israel, twice. Germany of course, and France and Paris. Let's see Sweden. Name it, I've been there.
The ABA selected you to go to all of these different places, in order to accredit and re evaluate and do the inspection of these different summer programs. Right. That also came with the fact that I was until I became the Chair of the Accreditation Committee, I was the Chair of the International Program Approval Committee of the ABA Section on Legal Education.
So you were doing site visits, you were deaning. Were you teaching at all during this period? No, I did not teach during this period. I had enough to do!
You were building a library. I was building a new library. My favorite story is that the first time I saw the blueprints that our architect, who was incidentally a very good architect, our first encounter was over whether or not we would have it match the other architecture.
And all of our alumni were really interested in that, and so was I. And he said, "But that roof is going to cost a million dollars," and I said, "Oh well, this is a religious school. God will provide."
He then brought me the inside blueprints after we had decided that the outside was going to look like Spanish Renaissance, and I looked at it and said, "Oh I forgot to tell you, that we were going to have twenty-one study rooms." I mean small rooms that students can work on group projects; even then I was very interested in curriculum and having group projects. I had been using those at Cleveland State with my corporation class and I wanted someplace so that my students could not tell me that they didn't have any place to meet or they couldn't make time or whatever. So I said, "Twenty-one that will basically have room for six people to work together in them." And he said, "Oh, we have a seminar room already planned, and a conference room already planned." And I said, "I said, study group." So, time went by the architect came and gave me some blueprints. I said to him, "You know I'm just a mountain girl. I'm not sure that I can read blueprints very well, but I don't see those study rooms," and he said, "Oh, we have the conference room, and seminar room." And I said, "We will have twenty one study rooms, or we will have a new architect." It was nice to be in a private school; that
6 couldn't have happened at Cleveland State. Anyway, actually they did finally finish the new library. That's how we got this wonderful library.
Yes, it is beautiful. And my husband also contributed a lot to the library. He was the chair of the committee to get Florida artist to donate paintings to the library.
They're beautiful paintings. I think we have a wonderful group of paintings in our library.
So you accomplished the library as dean. Yes.
What other things at Stetson do you see as major accomplishments? I know that one is just incredible. Well, the library, the International Program. It's been several long trips to Estonia. Interestingly enough I had been asked by the state of Estonia to come in and inspect all of their law schools in Talin. That was in the winter. Do you know it never gets light in Estonia in the wintertime? Laughs. I fortunately had not thrown away my boots and my fur coat.
What was it like being a female dean at Stetson? Well, of course, I was the first female dean. The problem I think that I've ran into with the faculty is that the faculty thought that I would have certain views towards politics and economics and other things that I did not have. And so that half of the faculty felt that, I had disappointed them and not been a very good liberal. I'm still not a very good liberal, but as one of my students said that, "I was basically a radical conservative."
And you eventually did step down as dean? Yes I did.
At Stetson. And you went back to teaching. I had felt that I had accomplished the things that I had set out to accomplish and again I had many more things I wanted to do and I really felt that it was time to step down. I had started the things that I had wanted to, and my husband was very ill at that time. He had always supported by feminist activities.
7 Tape 6
This is the Trailblazer's Project. It is November 19, 2009, and we are here in Gulfport Florida. My name is Ellen Podgor and I am interviewing Lizabeth Moody.
You eventually stepped down as Dean at Stetson. What have you done since then? One of the reasons for my stepping down at Stetson was that I had become Chair of the Accreditation Committee which was pretty much a full time job of the ABA. I am also the first woman who was the Chair of the Senior Lawyers Division of the ABA. It seemed to me that the time had come; I'd finished the Library, I'd started the Part Time Program, I had started the International Program, and that I could step down and let somebody else follow up on some of these things.
You have done so much since you were Dean at Stetson for example you have been writing. Yes.
Tell us about that? Well one of the things that I have been doing, since I after I stepped down, was revising the Model Non-Profit Corporation Act. I was chair of the Drafting Committee. Just this year I got an award from the Business Law Section, with respect to the Authors Award, to the Model Non Profit Corporation Act.
And that's the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association? Yes.
The Non-Profit Act, what kind of impact is it going to have on people? Enormous. Non-profit Organizations now represent 30% of our economy and most states have some kind of non-profit corporation act. We did a first draft of the act and implemented it in 1988. There was a lot of dissatisfaction with it. Act that was in effect it had a classification system that was very upsetting. So we knew that it needed total revision. And it took us a long time because unlike corporations where Joes grocery store and General Motors are organized in exactly the same way, non-profits we have, I think, the IRS has 28 different categories now of non-profits. We wanted to cover more than charities, all kinds of non-profit organizations which we did, but it took us a long time to do this, a lot of drafts, a lot of arguments and we had alot of people who were very, very interested in this and still are. I get many, many questions on the telephone. Evidently the ABA if somebody calls up and wants information on non-profit the ABA tells them to call me.
You not only accomplished redrafting the entire Non-Profit Act, but you also wrote an article about it in the University of Georgia Law Review. Yes I did. There was another interesting article that I didn't write, but it was about me and seven other women who were the first women who taught Corporations in law schools, which was an interesting thing that somebody wrote and that was also published in the University of Georgia Law Review. You may want to include the cite for the article.
1 You visited many different law schools throughout the years as a visiting professor. So you have not only experienced Stetson and Cleveland State, but also many other law schools. Tell us about some of this. Well I like to go visit. It is always interesting to go and I have had good opportunities to go visit. It started out just after I started teaching full time, I was invited to come over to Toledo because a friend of mine, Frank Bataugh, had become the Dean and he called up and said I would come over and help him out because he had to redo the faculty and if I would teach Corporations for a year it would be a big help to him. The next time I went to visit was at George Washington and there I taught Securities Law and Federal Practice, interestingly enough.
You continued these visits throughout the years. As a matter of fact, after you left the Deanship, you visited another school -- Brooklyn, right? Yes! Oh I visited SMU before that. I visited, the year I left the Deanship; I went back to Hawaii which I had visited before. The second time I went back I had a nice title. I was the Fujiyama Distinguished University Visiting Professor and that was fun to be back at Hawaii because I had been there before.
So you have probably visited more law schools in the United States as either a visiting professor or on an accreditation team? I've done a lot of site visits with respect to the ABA Accreditation. As I said, I was Chair of the Accreditation Committee then I became a member of Council.
With all that vast experience about different law schools, what would you like to see changed in the legal education or in law schools? One of my problems is that there is too much change right now. When I first started teaching, one of the reasons I think, sincerely I thought that women had to start teaching in law schools. There were almost no women teaching at the time I started teaching in 1971. I had been teaching as an adjunct before that. Then again, I went to Cleveland State as a visitor and then stayed, both my husband and my senior partner were all involved in politics and one was a Republican and one was a Democrat and I thought I would like to get out of that maze that was · forming around me. There were just very few women who were in teaching in law schools. I said we will never get women admitted to law school, and at that time there were very few women in law school, until we get some teachers teaching in law school. At the same time we were working on a case involving a pregnant school teacher who was given an unpaid leave for a year and a half as a result. After that we managed to get a Ford Foundation grant to found Women's Law Fund. At the same time we started the clinic at Cleveland State and the person really responsible for most of the work for the clinic, although I was president of the Women's Law Fund, was Jane Picker, who was wonderful and became a professor at Cleveland State and ran the clinics for many years, she just retired. Even my mother Clara Fine Moody helped. She did all of the bookkeeping for about 5 years.
2 When you stepped down as Dean at Stetson that must have been very difficult to go back to the faculty where you had once been a Dean. And that happens very often for people who have been Deans. Do you have any advice? Well I had the same experience at Cleveland State. For although I was only an Interim Dean, I was the Dean. I made all the decisions and then went back to the Faculty. And then went to, of course, LSAC. So I was sort of glad to go back to the Faculty to give me a chance to do some writing. Of course my work with the ABA continued and I felt that was very important because I thought legal education needed alot of attention. It still does, and so I really was pretty happy to be back on the faculty. Although one of the problems you have with being with the dean you tend to be officious from time to time and you have to be very careful not to step on somebody else's toes.
Now you have accomplished so much with the American Bar Association. I can think back years ago about you writing the Pre-Legal Education Report. That's right.
You gave advice for people who were going into law school or thinking about gong into law school and you were the centerpiece of getting all of that organized and getting it written. Tell us about that. Well I was just appointed chair of the committee on Pre-Legal Education and that was the work we needed to do and that is what we did.
And as a result of that an entire report was written giving advice to every undergraduate student who might be thinking about going into legal education. That's true. We published a brochure and did alot of thinking ourselves what we should say to people that might want to go. Of course we wanted to encourage women to go to law school at that point in time. We started having women in quantity during the Vietnam War where there were no males and so they let women in. Schools that had not let women in began to think that they'd like to have women in the schools, so women started flowing in.
Tell us about some of your other accomplishments with the American Bar Association, with the American Law Institute, and with all the other activities that you have been involved with. It seems that I've been on everything. I had only had been teaching two years when I was elected to the Executive Committee of the AALS which was interesting. And there again I think I maybe I was the third women to have been on that executive committee and I did that for three years and I learned alot about legal education that way. We had some interesting cases. For example one of the problems was that Bingham Young had applied for AALS accreditation. They had ABA accreditation, but they did discriminate against both women and minorities if they were not of the Mormon religion. I managed to be on the executive committee at that time where I remember asking Dean Lee, Russ Lee, who was the Dean at that time; I said "Now Mr. Lee" (because we had a rule against any kind of discrimination), "now if you had a woman visitor or a woman who wrote basically a piece of law review article on abortion favorably would that person ever get tenured?" and he said 11No."
3 So you made many changes throughout the years because now that is a very strong policy. Thafs right. And so there was a lot of work to be done. Also I was involved with Jane Picker again with the legislature with the Equal Rights Amendment. We went down and testified before the Ohio legislature. Did a lot of work in Ohio. On that issue we called it the Lizabeth Ann and Mary Jane bill of etiquette to go forward. I was for several years, the ABA representative to ALI-ABA.
So tell us a little bit more about starting up the AALS section, the women's section for the American Association of Law Schools, I know it didn't always exist and it was a group of women. Ruth Bader Ginsburg ... Thaf s right. Well I think Ruth was on it, and Marina Angel.
Angel? Angel, who was the real person behind that. I defer to her and she still is a very, very active, and her articles have been very, very good.
And there was basically one women's' table at that time. Thaf s right, that was all. I happen to be chair of the section committee of the AALS at the time, so was in a position to have that section of the committee approved.
That's amazing. I mean you look out at the crowd now and there are so many women there .
Oh absolutely.
AALS. How do you feel about what you see now? I feel very good about it, truthfully. But the one thing that I am concerned about is that a lot of young women don 1 t appreciate what we went through and there are still problems and don1 t understand that they are going to face some problems because of their gender.
What kind of advice would you give to the women today based on all of your experiences? The sort of advice that I gave to women that were graduating from law school when I was practicing law. We would always tell them, 11Now one thing you must never do is let them put a typewriter in your room, in your office. 11 A few of us that were practicing in Cleveland we would have lunch or something with the new girl in town and say that.
Today they all have computers. Now they all have computers. I would say rule number one was how you really had to keep from being treated like a secretary. I remember once, I recall I may have said this before, I was in the office during lunch and nobody else was there and the receptionist said that someone wanted to talk to a lawyer so I picked up the phone and said hello and said my name and he said 11 0h, there must have been a mistake, I wanted to talk to a lawyer.11 And I said "I am a 11 11 11 11 11 lawyer , and he said, well I wanted to talk to a partner and I said I am a partner and he said "well I am not gong to to talk to a women 11 and I said "too bad !11
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There has been so much that has been accomplished for women and you played such a major role in those accomplishments. Tell us how you see things from back then until now. It was difficult. I mean it was very difficult for women to get jobs. When my husband and I, he graduated from law school a year after I did, and I had really a very good job in Connecticut. But we had decided before I even took that job that we knew I would only stay for a year. But, I had good experience practicing in Connecticut and was offered the opportunity to stay where I was, but my husband did want to go to a large firm, but not in New York and he was offered a position at Squire Sanders and Dempsey in Cleveland. It was interesting because I was the first women that Squire Sanders and Dempsey in Cleveland had ever interviewed and they told me they just couldn't hire a woman. So I said to my husband it seemed like a nice firm, I had gone out and they interviewed me in Cleveland. I said, but it would be 10 years before they would hire a women. And so he was hired. And it was almost 10 years before they hired a woman. They hired women, a few women in the mean time, but never one that was on the sort of tenured track. It was again many years before they made a woman a partner.
Do you think that with all that has been accomplished, it's enough? No. I think there is still a long way to go.
What needs to be done? Well here again we do have a glass ceiling that is still there, unfortunately. I have an award [he Jean Allard Glass Cutter Award] that was given by the Business Law Section. Interestingly enough how I got involved with the Business Law Section, I asked to be put on the committee, but at that time you couldn't volunteer for committees, you had to be asked to join the Business Law Section Committee and I never got any responses. My husband had a friend in the Public Utility Section who was also in the Business Law Section and I said you know I would like to really be on a committee in the Business Law Section. He said well which one, and I said the Non-Profit Association Committee (they had just formed the Non-Profit Corporation Committee.) Somehow or another, he managed to get me appointed to that committee and that is how I started out with my Model Non-Profit Corporation Act activities.
Would you say that with most of the things that you've been able to achieve that there has been some man that has been able to help you? Frequently. Interestingly enough, the people who I have found to be the most open and helpful were not the young lawyers, who were competing and they would they would just as soon get rid of a women in the competition, but the older lawyers; both in practice and in academia that I tended to find people who were mentors who were helpful. And of course I had worked for a woman lawyer for some years in a patent firm. She was the senior partner. She had taken over from her father when her father died, she became the older person in the firm and was an excellent lawyer and wonderful lawyer and I learned alot from her about how to survive. And I was friendly with her until she died at 92.
Survival tips? Survival tips.
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Yes. Lots of survival tips.
And I know you have passed them along to many women throughout the years -- as a mentor to many women. Yes, I always thought that one of my duties was to help other women for us to open up the law schools to women both teachers and students. Unfortunately, I found a lot of women who got into good positions and then discriminated against women.
Tell us about that. Well I think this is still very true today that there is the woman against women problem. Women will try to rise up and then not help other women and will just do the opposite.
It is very important for women to help other women? It is exceedingly important. When I was at Cleveland State, I was very, very active in hiring for the University. I think when I first went there that I was, that there were only two or three of us that were full professors and we worked very hard too. But I remember once the provost saying to me that, we had an affirmative action case, and said to me I can 1t understand how you and the woman who was counsel for the University look at things in an entirely different way. There was a big case at that time and I must say that I went back and testified against Cleveland State University, after I had become Dean at Stetson, in that case.
You have won a lot of awards throughout the years. Most recently the Hall of Fame Award at Stetson. Yes.
Tell us about some of those awards? Well awards come and go. 11vebeen very lucky. The two I was most excited about, one was the Ohio Bar Medal. Almost all state bars have a bar medal which is a very, very important thing and I was given the Ohio Bar Medal. One of the reasons I was excited was that was for my activities on behalf of women. And then the other was that I was given an award but at the same time the Mayor of Cleveland named the day that the award was presented as the Lisabeth Moody Day in Cleveland.
And for all of your accomplishments at Stetson you've also have been inducted into Stetson's Hall of Fame. Right.
Having built the library and moved the law school to a different tier? I hope so.
It was in the third tier if I am not mistaken when you came here? And in the second when I left.
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Yes. Of course a lot of that here again was that I was on the Accreditation Committee and I know what the game was.
With all of these accomplishments, tell us the pieces of advice that you want to leave with us here today. Well I think women still have an obligation to other women. And you may have to set aside some times things you want for that. I remember one of my ... a female who was trying a case for women's law fund who lost the case and cried. I knew her very well and she cried about everything. I mean if she went to the movies she would cry. So I called her up and said I wanted her to come to my office immediately and bring a whole box of Kleenex because I didn't think that women ought to be crying. So it is things like that.
As I said my mentors gave me lots of advice. The patent lawyer basically gave me alot of advice about clothing. That you always look like a lawyer. You don't really want to go to court in your bikini and so on. I learned to deal with other lawyers on the same level. I mean it was always clear that I was a lawyer. I never did anything, ... I once, one of my partners came in ... we were both in the firm and he said that he had some clients with him and he knew that I did not type, but could I just type out a clause to put in a contract. I said I would try, but I don't really know how the machines work, but I will do what I can. So I did, and I took that and handed that to him. Well after his clients left he came in and said, "You are a terrific lawyer, you are a terrible typist." I said thanks a lot I want you to remember that.
I was very fortunate. Although I had problems when I first went to Cleveland for a woman lawyer to find a job. You almost thought that all the firms had a big sign up in front that we do not hire women because they wouldn't even talk to you. Someone once said well it is not because you are a woman; it is because your husband is in a large firm and I couldn't litigate against it if you were a woman. And I said my husband and I talked about this and we don't believe that's true. I also remember him coming home one night and saying that the managing partner at the firm had called him and said, that one of their clients had been sued, it was a large corporation, on a women's rights case and he said and I thought I ought to tell you that the lawyer on the other side name is Lizabeth Moody. He said well we have different names.
Well thank you very much. This has truly been an honor for me to have the opportunity to participate and interview you as part of the Trailblazers project and thank you for all your time so that we can record all of this so that other women out there can learn from everything that you have accomplished throughout these years. Thank you.
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