Shirley M. Hufstedler

November 22, 2005; April 15, 2006; January 13, 2007; February 3, 2007; May 28, 2007; October 13, 2007; September 13, 2007

Recommended Transcript of Interview with Shirley M. Hufstedler (Nov. 22, 2005; Apr. 15, Citation 2006; Jan. 13, 2007; Feb. 3, 2007; May 28, 2007; Oct. 13, 2007; Sept. 13, 2007), https://abawtp.law.stanford.edu/exhibits/show/shirley-m-hufstedler.

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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 Trailblazers in the Law

ORAL HISTORY

of

SHIRLEY M. HUFSTEDLER

Interviewer: Lee Edmon

Dates of Interviews:

November 22, 2005 April 15, 2006 January 13, 2007 February 3, 2007 May 28, 2007 October 13, 2007 September 13, 2008 ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

FIRST INTERVIEW

November 22, 2005

This is the first interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on November 22, 2005.

Ms. Edmon: All right, I think we've got this started. It is November 22, 2005, at five

o'clock in the evening, and I'm here with the Honorable Shirley Hufstedler

in her office at Morrison & Foerster. So, I'm going to put this over here

so that it's easier to hear you.

Ms. Hufstedler: OK.

Ms. Edmon: We're going to start back at the beginning, so why don't you tell me about

your place ofbirth, date ofbirth, and then what you remember about your

family.

Ms. Hufstedler: I was born on August 24, 1925, in Denver, Colorado, and I had an older

brother three years older than I who was likewise born in Denver. My

mother's family emigrated from Germany early in the 19th century, and my

grandmother had a very dramatic life, as did my mother. I'll just hand you

a little piece that my mother wrote, which tells you about her family, and

these people were pioneers in Missouri. My mother had a lot of tragedy

happen in her family, and my grandmother had tragedy in hers, because in

the woodland areas where they were farming on the Missouri

- 1 - river, my grandmother's father was killed felling a tree. My great­ grandmother was left with three small children, and she had a flood which destroyed their place of living. They barely escaped with their lives.

When my grandmother was about 7 years old, she had a case of conjunctivitis, and there was no real medical care available. An itinerant

man who came around pretending that he had some medical experience, put blue vitriol in her eyes and burned the lenses. All of her life she was

legally blind, like looking through tissue paper. Now, of course, today

you'd do implants, but then you couldn't do anything. So, due to a variety

of vicissitudes, my great-grandmother, along with her three children

including my grandmother, eventually emigrated to Colorado, where my

father was born.

My mother was born in Missouri, but she had barely been able to attend

school -- there was very little education available -- so when she entered

the Denver schools, she made up all of the elementary school years in a

year, and thereafter she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class

and was offered a scholarship to the University of Colorado, very rare in

those days. But since her father had left her mother in the meantime, she

had to go to work to support herself and her mother, so she did. However,

she did take enough extension courses that she eventually got a university

degree and became a schoolteacher in the Denver schools.

However, my mother had a very bad time during the First World War

because her name was German. Her name was Eva von Behren. At that

- 2 - time, even composers of music whose names were Germanic had been

ripped out of schoolbooks. It was not a very pleasant time to be a teacher.

Then, she had the bad taste to marry my father, who had been a naval

officer during the First World War, and they considered it unsuitable for

women who were married to continue teaching, and absolutely verboten

that a woman who was married and had a child or was pregnant should go

on teaching. You shouldn't expose any of the children who were students

to a female who was pregnant, which seems to me an outstandingly sappy

point of view, but that's the way it was. So, she was dismissed from

teaching because she became pregnant with my brother, Kenneth.

Well, my father worked with a lot of different kinds of employment -­

primarily construction. He and his partner, a man by the name of Roger

Mead, developed their own construction company specializing in

construction of large buildings. They became eventually the largest such

construction company in Colorado. I

So, then the Great Depression came along. There wasn't enough work in

Colorado to support that firm. Therefore, when the Roosevelt

administration decided to create government projects for large construction

corps, university buildings and, of course, post offices and other such major

facilities all over the West, my father's firm bid on those projects, and

succeeded in landing enough of them. That, however, meant that my father

A little footnote: when Justice Byron White was a young man, he worked for my father's construction company in Colorado, and therefore Byron and I have known each other forever, and we're very good friends.

- 3 - would move with the family in every state and city in which a building was going on until the building was far enough along so that he could confidently leave it to a construction superintendent. For that reason, I never attended school in the same state, let alone in the same city, after I was above the second grade. I was in schools in New Mexico and

Montana and California and Wyoming. Every place I went I was wildly ahead of most kids on most things, but in some areas, like arithmetic, I would either be repeating what I already knew, or I would be asked to solve problems I'd never seen before in my life; so, it was challenging, to say the least. And being the new kid in a new town on a new block always made it rather difficult to adjust. Well, one thing that stood out to me, I think, well in all of those traumas was that one learns how to get along with other human beings, and how to smell trouble before it hits you in the face, and I think that's been useful in my life.

But after this strange and wacky kind of, I use the word "education" loosely, I ended up for a time in California schools in the sixth grade, and to my immense surprise, since I had just moved from a town in Montana where it got to 50 degrees below zero, I was astonished when the youngsters in my class all leaped up in great excitement and ran to the window because we were having a little bit of snow fall in Los Angeles.

Oh, my God! But in each one of these places, I was fortunate to make some good women friends, girlfriends then, most of whom have now gone on before me, but we maintained those friendships for decades even though

- 4 - we didn't see each other.

But, I had figured out that, by the time I was 13 years old, I would be able to figure out how to get some kind of a paying job, so I've had some kind of a paying job and went to school, since I was 13 years old. Of course, I did do some babysitting. In those days you got a ripping 50 cents for an evening, not only to take care of the children, but also to do the family dinner dishes and all the rest. Well, that's the way it was, and then later when I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico from California, I fibbed a little bit, and said I was 14 when I was really 13 because I was in high school. I had finished high school just before I was 16 years old and finished my undergraduate degree at the University ofNew Mexico when I was 19.

Then, in the meantime, I had made a very dear friend who was really the most wonderful mentor for me. His name was Ernie Pyle, and he was a famous war correspondent. I got acquainted with him initially because my father had gone into a small construction business by that time, that he owned, and he built a house - at that time he built all houses -- and Ernie

Pyle bought one of them; so, we became very fast friends, peculiar for the vast difference in our ages, but I think he was the first person who

thoroughly believed in me, that I had extraordinary talents, and he always

encouraged me. And, when he was home temporarily from the war, I

would become his secretary, so we spent a lot of time together, and he had

a great deal of influence on what's happened to me because ofhis

- 5 - confidence in me. Many, many years later, a woman who knew him as well, said that he had said to her about me ''when she grows up I want to marry her!" Ha, ha, ha, ha!!! There was no romantic attachment at all. I loved him dearly, but not romantically at all.

And we spent a lot of time together because Ernie's wife, Jerry Pyle, had been suffering rather severe mental illness for a long time. She had bipolar disease, and it became much worse when she became addicted to liquor and to uppers of various kinds so that a lot of times when Ernie was back from the war, Jerry was hospitalized. Now, when he was gone, I used to go up quite frequently to prepare dinner for her, because she wasn't eating and to calm her down I would sit at the piano. I was a piano teacher at the time -- I also taught piano -- and I would play some Chopin or some

Beethoven, things that she liked, then I would feed her and put her to bed.

But, one of these times when Ernie was gone, she really was completely off the wall, and I awakened in the middle of the night and realized something was wrong. When I was awake, suddenly I realized she had turned the gas on; so, I opened the windows quickly and turned the gas off, and when I

came back into the guest bedroom where I was sleeping, here came Jerry with big sci~sors and was prepared to stab me! [chuckle] I thought that was more than enough for that program. At 16, I had enough wit about me to get the scissors away from her and tum her into bed, and when I got

her back into bed, I didn't linger. I left. So, I never went back to spend

the night with her in that good clinic, which was why, of course, that poor

- 6 - Ernie when he was home on leave for a time lived by himself, which was why we spent our time talking together.

Well, among other developments during that time, a movie was going to be

made of one of Ernie's books, and the man who was chosen to play Ernie

Pyle was Burgess Meredith; so, I got well acquainted with Burgess

Meredith when he came back to Albuquerque to see Ernie. When I

graduated from college, I had no reason to want to linger in Albuquerque,

New Mexico, so I was going to go west. I had then entertained the idea,

and had been toying with it some time, I'd especially like to go to law

school; however, the pickings financially were very slim, so, because of my

connection with Ernie and my knowing Burgess Meredith, I was hired as a

secretary for Paulette Goddard and Burgess Meredith, and I worked at

Paramount. I soon decided that, after a year of that, it was time for me to

go to law school. My enchantment with the entertainment industry, it

turned out, was quite limited.

So, I had a boyfriend when I was an undergraduate. I had dated quite a bit,

and he knew I wanted to go to law school, and he wanted to go to law

school too, so he persuaded me to apply to Stanford because that's where

he was going; so, we both applied to Stanford and we both were admitted

with the largest class ever admitted to Stanford Law School. Because that

class began at the very end of the Second World War, the class was

considerably older, about five years older, than most entering classes in law

school.

- 7 - By the time I had entered law school, I had also, of course, had a lot of

different kinds of jobs. I'd done everything from selling from door to door,

to doing visits on all kinds of neighborhoods in response to employment by

a statistical company to find out who was doing what or who was buying

what. Doing all these cold calls let me fully appreciate what the difference

between a cold call and a hot call was!

But, I found out that -- something I've always really cherished about it -­

people who were lower income and who were minorities who lived in

Albuquerque were always more hospitable to me than the middle and so­

called upper income people were. Many of them were very kind to me,

and needless to say, I'm going to return that kindness to them by never

prying into things that I thought would be unhappy to them. But, I learned

what I had to learn for the job I was doing. I was also the editor-in-chief

of the college newspaper. I pledged to Chi Omega sorority when I was a

freshman, and I earned a number of honors when I was an undergraduate.

So, I think the experiences were helpful and, of course, I must admit I had

a very good time with lots ofboyfriends at the big airbase.

Ms. Edmon: I'd like to go back, if you could, and just fill in some of the blanks ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, sure.

Ms. Edmon: . . . from the very early days. You mentioned your grandmother, who was

Ms. Hufstedler: ... partially blind .

Ms. Edmon: . . . partially blind. What was her name?

- 8 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I'll give you all of this, but her name was Adeline, we called her

Addie.

Ms. Edmon: And was she alive when you were alive?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I knew her very well, because during a significant part ofmy young

childhood, she lived with my mother and father. She was ... I realize that

she was terribly old. She was, of course, an old woman, but the fact that

she didn't have eyesight meant that her world was limited to what she

heard on the radio. She simply didn't see well enough to read. Although I

talked to her, and I was fond of her, but not particularly, because our

interests were so vastly different that we didn't have just an enormous

amount to say to each other.

I did know she drove my mother up the wall, because she would come to

see my mother and have an endless amount of complaints. Well, I can

understand why she was complaining, but mother couldn't fix it. It just

was a way for her to get her troubles out in the open, so that didn't make

my mother very happy, and my father was always working terribly hard, so

they didn't have a lot of time for much fun.

I thought maybe ... I brought a little thing that might be of some interest to

you, because .... [review family photograph] Now, this was my father's

family. That's my father, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, and my

brother when he was a baby. They were really a very strong bunch of

individuals.

- 9 - Ms. Edmon: Now this is your father ...

Ms. Hufstedler: That's my father as a young man.

Ms. Edmon: And this is ...

Ms. Hufstedler: ... my grandmother. That's Sara Mount. I have no other copy of this

one, so I'll give this one to you to tell you about my mother's family.

Now, my mother's family were all Germans. My father's family, who

immigrated to the United States early in the 19th century, were all either

Scottish or English. There had been some distinguished people in that

family before the younger men wanted to emigrate to the United States.

My father and his family lived in Denver. My mother and father knew each

other when they were in high school. When my father came back from the

war, they remet at a dance in Denver, and one thing led to another,

romance blossomed, and the two of them married. And, it was altogether,

I think, a happy marriage, though not a tranquil one.

My father was very bright, but he loved the Navy, and, as was not

uncommon even for people who were not in the Navy, my older brother, 3

years my senior, was in sailor suits a lot of the time. Eventually, he joined

the Navy during the Second World War. He was a submarine officer, and

he thought being a submarine officer was absolutely wonderful. I must say,

a love affair with a submarine I could not bear to share. I would get

claustrophobic even going to visit him.

Ms. Edmon: Was your father a submarine officer?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, no, he was an ensign in the Navy in World War I, but he was not in

- 10 - submarines. He was in the regular old-fashioned Navy, but he had a lot of assignments he thought were terrific. He got to live in San Francisco for a while, and other places he thought were really grand. He made a lot of friends that way. But, anyway, my brother's enthusiasm for the Navy never flagged.

At the end of the Second World War, instead of doing what I thought he

had loved the most, he was really tremendously suited to be a college

professor -- he was an engineer also -- but my dad wanted him to come

into the construction business with him, so that's what he did, and he

continued the business after my father's death.

I never knew my great-grandmother on my father's side very well because

she was hard of hearing, and I was a very young child when she died. But I

did love my father's mother. We nicknamed her "Namu" -you know,

small kids always name grandparents something that sounds appropriate to

them, and we were very close. It was she who taught me to cook about

the time when I was six years old. She taught me how to cook and can and

pickle all these things.

Now, it's true that I never did learn how to properly cook a jack rabbit.

Her husband was an avid hunter who believed that if you couldn't kill a

deer in one shot, you had no business being allowed to hunt at all. My

father had some proclivities in the same way, ones I might say I never did

share. Anyway, that was male stuff in those days. And of course there was

a lot of very wide open space in Colorado at that time, and on holidays we

- 11 - did spend a good deal of time in the Colorado mountains which I came to

love. We also got well-acquainted with many of the old mining towns

because my father's father was an engineer who, among other things, wired

the first hotel for electricity in the world with Thomas Alva Edison, and he

ran the electrical facilities in some of these mining camps during that period

of time. He was a character, and he was an inventor. When he was falling

in love with one ofhis inventions, he'd follow anybody at all, including the

children or somebody who was just stopping by, even if they went to the

bathroom, he'd come by still continuing to tell them all about what he was

doing, inventing. He invented a lot of things.

Ms. Edmon: Now, did you know him as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I did know him. I was still very young, about 5 years old when he

died. I called him "Baps," and I got along with him fine. I thought some

of his habits were peculiar. He was one of the generation who liked and

did dip snuff, which I thought was very peculiar, but dipping snuff among

people of his age and circumstances was not at all rare in those days. Of

course, he thought cigarettes were an abomination. No real male would

ever touch a cigarette, a good cigar maybe, but never a cigarette.

So, anyway, the peculiarities of the family were visited upon me in various

ways as they are with most families, and I admit that some ofmy

peculiarities were visited back on them -- that's only fair, you know? So, I

learned a lot from all of them, and each one I learned from differently. I

also had a great aunt - Aunt Clara, my grandmother's sister, who lived

- 12 - with my father and my grandparents for many years. She had been trained to be an opera singer, among other things, but unfortunately she lost her hearing, and that ended that. She had a younger brother who did have a perfectly beautiful voice, but he died very young. She didn't have that good a voice, but she had a passable voice. It wasn't too bad, but the loss of her hearing meant that she lost the musical career. She lost whatever hope she ever had for having a family of her own. She remained a maiden lady for the rest of her life, but I always got along with Aunt Clara just fine.

My grandmother, Sara, was one of 13 children. Of course, as you well know, in the 19th century there wasn't much any woman could do about whether she had that many children or not. I knew only two of the sisters besides my grandmother and Aunt Clara, but I really only met them - I can't claim that I knew them at all. When my grandfather and grandmother came to the States, some of them moved to upstate Illinois where they had a farm. That's where the 13 children were born, and the last one was the sole male - as I said, he did not live very long, but my grandmother developed no enthusiasm for taking care of children, because she had been taking care ofbabies and children since she was little more than a child herself, because she was the second eldest, and so, with her mother perpetually bearing and her caring for all these infants, her enthusiasm for a lot of children was minute. And the results of all that, besides the disinclination on the part of my grandfather to have a particularly close relationship with my grandmother, I think, were relatively limited under the

- 13 - circumstances.

But, why my grandmother, after all that experience with all those sisters,

decided to dress my father as a girl until he was 5, I have no idea, but he

certainly outgrew it and was a man's man. My grandmother had her own

peculiarities, but she was a lot of fun sometimes; she knew a lot of things

that I was interested in learning, and she never minded taking time to teach

me a lot of things that she thought would help me. But, she knew how to

deal with frontier life and a lot of other things that certainly I had no reason

to know anything about, and she enjoyed telling me about all of her

experiences, and I enjoyed listening. My brother, of course, may have

enjoyed a little bit of it, but he was not in the cooking mode by any means,

and he never learned how, so the result was a cozy relationship between

my father's mother and me. But when my grandfather died, my

grandmother, I use the word loosely, "remodeled" this big Victorian house

and took in roomers ...

Ms. Edmon: Where was this?

Ms. Hufstedler: Denver ... to make ends meet. Of course, there wasn't any such thing as

Social Security or anything, so she just had to make do with what she

could do. And, some of the roomers were very strange. They also gave me

an education, sometimes a bewildering education, such as one of the

tenants who came racing through the kitchen on our floor, brandishing a

large butcher knife and chasing her husband. I thought that was a little

more excitement than any ofus needed for dinner! Oh, well .... It did

- 14 - train me rather young that not all married couples get along over time.

So, there were lots of funny things that happened, and there were sad things that happened in growing up. I always had an opportunity when I was staying with my grandmother to practice the piano and do things I really enjoyed besides cleaning up the pots and pans.

So, after we moved around the United States, I didn't see my grandmother unfortunately contracted breast cancer, and at that time not a lot was known about it, but in the meantime, she had become a devout Christian

Scientist, and had people pray, but it didn't seem to be very effective.

Now, at the same time, my father grew to have a detestation of that faith, because he was nearsighted, and my grandmother didn't believe in having him be fitted for glasses; so, until he was in college he had a terrible time seeing what was going on, and he used to have blinding headaches, and all they would do for him was pray over him a lot. Well that sort of turned him against not only Christian Science, but left him very skeptical about organized religion. My mother, however, was very sure that my brother's and my education was not complete without spending a good deal of time in Sunday school -- not always the same church, but different churches -­ and I must say I found Sunday school incredibly boring when it went beyond using crayons to paint outlines of pictures, because when I asked the Sunday school teacher questions, they wouldn't be able to answer them. I wanted to know where something was, where it went, what happened, and there was just no response because the people who were

- 15 - doing that were undoubtedly faithful and cared about the religious

education of the children, but they didn't have enough education

themselves to be able to explain what the Bible passage was about.

Instead, mostly what I was doing, and what the other youngsters were

doing, was endless committing to memory long sections of pieces in the

Bible to be able to recite it letter-perfect without having any particularly

good idea about what the point was. It was just to take the little critters

out of the way of the adults while they were doing what they wanted to do,

and I'm afraid didn't accomplish much else; however, I did go faithfully,

and when I was in Dillon, Montana, I did sell daffodils for the benefit of the

church door to door.

Ms. Edmon: And what church was this?

Ms. Hufstedler: Episcopal, and it was daffodils at 25 cents a bunch, but it was during the

depths of the Depression, and even with those girls coming to the door to

ask them if they'd like to buy, it was more often than not that doors were

slammed in my face. They were embarrassed. They didn't have 25 cents.

So, it was a grim time. It's hard for people to believe today when we

mourn about how we have financial troubles, but when the financial system

of both Europe and America both collapsed, it was a period of great stress.

There were thousands upon thousands of young men who had no

opportunities for any employment. They bummed on railroads. They went

to various towns and communities to beg food from people who lived

there. It wasn't that they were lazy, there was just no employment, and of

- 16 - course, the breadlines stretched everywhere.

Ms. Edmon: You were very young. You remember ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I remember this vividly, sure. It was not a fleeting memory by any

means. People were required to figure out how they could do what they

wanted to do with no resources except their own, and that's what I did; so,

it certainly trained me not to be intimidated by hardships or blockades,

things like that. I always figured that, ifl could sit down and think of some

way through it or around it, I could get it done. And, it didn't work all the

time, but it worked most of the time, but I also learned a lot about other

people, and, of course, in doing so other people learned a lot about me.

My brother and I were very different, but we were devoted to each other.

We sometimes fought like two stray panthers. My mother and dad took us

on a lot of automobile trips, and they had a very good way when we got

too quarrelsome. They'd stop the car, let us out, they'd drive up a quarter

of a mile, and we'd have to run to catch up and get back in the car. But it

wasn't dangerous at that time because·these were sparsely traveled roads,

and I found out that that was probably healthy. It was certainly good for

the parents' sanity, and took a lot of eager energy out of my brother and

me. And we played games, because there was little by way of amusement

you had, except what you made yourselves. So, we played all kinds of

games - board games, every kind of game - Parcheesi, poker, all kinds of

available board games, and endless games of Monopoly, so that I did learn

about cards, and you learn a lot about people when you play cards with

- 17 - them. Two ways to get to know somebody sometimes better than you'd like to: one is to play cards with them and the other is to take a trip with them, and in each instance, the fa9ade of the person washes away very quickly.

And, it's another time in which to remember that a sense ofhumor is one of the best defenses against somebody who is behaving rather inappropriately so that a sense of humor has saved me from a lot of things.

Among other things, I think it helped me to understand not to take myself too seriously. Ifl thought somebody was being something of a boob a time or two, I realized that so was I a time or two, and that means that you don't have a serious problem avoiding arrogance. I have had no reason to feel arrogant in my life. Instead, it's better to think about what other people need, and if you are able to at least make a try at helping people get what they need, you can get along with them; so mostly, I have.

END OF SESSION

- 18 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

SECOND INTERVIEW

April 15, 2006

This is the second interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on April 15, 2006.

Ms. Edmon: Okay, this is April 15, 2006. We are back in your lovely home. Thank you

again for making it available to us, and I want to start by just following up on

some of the questions that we didn't cover the last time around. The first is

your maiden name and date ofbirth.

Ms. Hufstedler: My maiden name was Shirley Ann Mount. My date ofbirth was August 24,

1925.

Ms. Edmon: And so, currently, if you go by Shirley M. Hufstedler, the Mis Mount?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's correct.

Ms. Edmon: And your place of birth was

Ms. Hufstedler: Denver, Colorado.

Ms. Edmon: Your mother's full name?

Ms. Hufstedler: She was Eva Estelle Mount.

Ms. Edmon: And your father?

Ms. Hufstedler: Earl Stanley Mount.

Ms. Edmon: And your mother's maiden name?

Ms. Hufstedler: Eva von Behren.

Ms. Edmon: How about your mother's mother's full name?

- 19 - Ms. Hufstedler: My mother's mother's full name was Adelaide Von Behren.

Ms. Edmon: And your father's mother's full name?

Ms. Hufstedler: My father's mother's full name was Sara Mount.

Ms. Edmon: You know, we talked about both of those grandmothers a fair amount at the

first session.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Did you live with both of them at some point or another or just ...

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I lived for a while with my mother's mother because she lived with us for

about two years.

Ms. Edmon: And that was while you were in Denver?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: The period in Denver was from the time you were born until about the second

grade, right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Correct.

Ms. Edmon: And so that was until about 1932?

Ms. Hufstedler: Exactly.

Ms. Edmon: Now, I've got a memory test for you. Are you able to walk us through-I

know you moved around because of your father's construction business'.""­

can you identify what other places you went to and where you were and

when?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, approximately. We first left Denver to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico

where my father's construction firm was retained to build several buildings.

We stayed there for about a year. As had been his practice when the

- 20 - buildings were well along, he would move to go to the next place, leaving the

finishing construction to one of his superintendents. Then, we moved back to

Denver for several months and then we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico,

where he had some more buildings under construction. Then, we moved very

fleetingly back to Denver.

From thence we went to Dillon, Montana where it was bitterly cold. He had

some major construction there, and it was a miserable year. I had some good

times anyway, but it was so cold that the concrete would. freeze as it was

being poured into the forms for the construction. Then, as if that weren't

enough, the brick that was to be used in the building was to be made at

Helena, Montana, but they had a major earthquake and it took all the kilns

down; so, everything had to be shipped in, and on a contract that involved

deadlines and time and materials and all the rest, it was a terrible struggle.

During the winter, one could not be outside without wearing a scarf over the

face because your face would freeze, and the grease froze around the wheels

of the vehicles. In short, it was bitter. I never saw the ground from the

middle of September until May. But, anyway ... my father became

extremely distressed during that period of time, for very good reason, and he

took time off for nearly a year to move to Los Angeles.

Ms. Edmon: What grades were you in when you were in Montana?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I started out in the fourth grade, but I was skipped into the fifth grade.

By the time we left Montana, I'd been skipped again to the sixth grade. I

hadn't finished the sixth grade until I got to Los Angeles.

- 21 - Ms. Edmon: So then to Los Angeles in sixth grade?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I was there for a year, and my father and mother decided they'd like to

move back to Albuquerque, so we did. He decided to leave his former firm in

which he was a partner and to create his own firm, this time going into home

construction rather than building post offices and other large structures,

which he did. He started out in a fairly small way, but the business moved

right along and he built lots and lots of houses.

So, that was life and, needless to say, my education was a bit strange because

every time I went someplace they had already covered what I had not covered

or they were covering something I had never seen before, so it was always

more than slightly exciting, and, of course, every time there were new people

to meet, new faces, but I will say that I think that overall it probably did me a

lot of good. I learned how to get along with an awful lot of different kinds of

people, and I also learned the joys oflibraries everywhere. After all, we

didn't have such things as television or anything like that. We had some

radio, but I could always find an armload ofbooks.

Ms. Edmon: What kind of things did you like to read?

Ms. Hufstedler: I read everything, and, if I came across a writer whose work I liked, I simply

read everything that writer wrote. And it was an eclectic collection of

writers, but it was also, in a very real sense, it was educational as well.

Moreover, I discovered that, even in very small communities, you could

always find somebody's local museum. And, you find out an awful lot about

people, about what they like to collect, who they collect from, who comes to

- 22 - see what there is to be collected, and it tells you very quickly a lot about the

community in which you happen to be living. Fortunately, I was able to find a

music teacher every place I was and people were very, very kind to me to let

me come to their home and practice the piano.

Ms. Edmon: As I recall, it was piano that was your instrument?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I also did a great deal of dancing.

Ms. Edmon: What kind of dancing?

Ms. Hufstedler: All kinds. As a very young person, I started in ballet. I had an excellent

dancing school for classical dance in Denver, but I also did every sort of other

dancing. I did tap dancing and acrobatic dancing, all kinds of dance, and I

continued dancing with some degree of enthusiasm all the way through my

undergraduate career at college; thereafter, it became a little difficult to find

somebody or the time to undertake a great deal of dancing, but I enjoyed it. I

never thought I'd marry a man who didn't like to dance. Well, I found out

there were a lot more attractions to my husband than a delight in dance. In

fact, the only time I've seen Seth get up voluntarily to dance was when he

was being made an honorary Don Cossack in Russia. [laughter] So, of

course, the female dancers were, to put it mildly, fascinating.

Ms. Edmon: I would have thought that's something he liked to do.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, he's been walking up and down mountains and breaking codes and all

that sort of thing. He's very athletic, but dancing was not one of his

amusements.

- 23 - Ms. Edmon: Were you able to find dance lessons in all of these various places you moved

to?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, everyone was terribly hard up because this was during the depths of the

Depression, and there was always some sort of person who'd been a dance

teacher in school or who got married and realized that she was going to have

to earn some money. Prices, of course, were very modest indeed. I could

always find somebody, and I could also find somebody to give me some piano

lessons, but, you know, a little ingenuity makes up for quite a bit of what is

lost in other directions.

Ms. Edmon: What other extra-curricular activities were you involved in? Let's stick with

pre-high school.

Ms. Hufstedler: Pre-high school-welL mostly it was the same thing. I was still playing the

piano a good deal, and I had a lot of friends I went to various programs with.

I was in the Girl Scouts. I did the usual round of youngsters at that age, and I

was expected to help in the house too, which, of course, I did.

Ms. Edmon: Now, Girl Scouts-was that the only all-girls organization that you

participated in up to this point?

Ms. Hufstedler: Primarily, because the number of boys in those days who took up dancing

was very few, almost all of them were girls. Later on, of course, there were

boys who joined in some of these things. Not in the Girl Scouts, of course,

but in some of the other activities. I'm thinking more particularly of those

young men whose parents either beguiled them, or they persuaded themselves

they'd like to learn to play the piano, but the number ofboys per girl was very

- 24 - small, and, of course, because of the condition of the country, there was no

extra money for such frivolous things as dancing lessons or music lessons for

boys.

Ms. Edmon: In a conversation we had that's not on tape, you mentioned that the Girl

Scouts in those days actually sold cookies, but in a slightly different way.

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, indeed, because we made the cookies and sold them from door to

door. They were not manufactured and sold to us. You made them, and I

must say for the most part they were better than what Girl Scout cookies are

today.

Ms. Edmon: That's remarkable. In those days, say, up until high school, what would you

say your favorite classes were?

Ms. Hufstedler: I always enjoyed English a lot, and I enjoyed history. My education in

arithmetic was so spotty and sometimes so erratic that I didn't learn to love

that, and I enjoyed writing, so I spent most of my time doing things of that

sort. Now, of course, we did have things like spelling bees-I enjoyed

spelling bees-and I happened to be good at grammar, so it's easy enough to

like the things in which we excel. Occasionally, in some of these places there

was an art class, which I took, and there was occasionally in gymnastics some

dance as well; so, I did do some of that, but at that time the number of so­

called frills was very slight.

Ms. Edmon: You've mentioned the Depression before. How did you observe that the

Depression affected your father's business?

- 25 - Ms. Hufstedler: It restrained it. My father and his partner used to have the largest

construction firm in Colorado, and the Depression didn't hit as fast in the

West as it did in the East, but when it hit, construction just stopped. The

reason he went on the road was because, by that time, Roosevelt had

developed programs to put people back to work, and among them was the

matter of constructing public buildings. That's what he bid on, in

competition, of course, and that's what really brought him through the depths

of the Depression.

He owned a lot of property, very valuable property, hotels and apartment

house, things like that, but the hotels didn't have business and my father

simply couldn't bring himself to throw his tenants out in the street when they

couldn't pay the rent, so they stayed there, and they didn't pay the rent.

Gradually, all these things were lost for taxes.

It affected all ofus in very different, but sometimes in the same, ways. There

were long soup lines. Thousands upon thousands of men were simply almost

hobos, moving around from town to town, riding boxcars, looking for work.

Everybody in any city of any size had swarms of people who catne by who

were out of work to try to get something to eat, to beg an apple, something.

The signs were absolutely everywhere, and, of course, then, the banks closed,

so people were manifestly very, very hard up. Between the soup lines and the

bread lines and the begging from door to door, it couldn't have been lost

upon anybody that the economy of the United States had collapsed, as had

the economy of Europe. It was a desperate time, and there was a lot of

- 26 - agitation with respect to all this, but Congress in the Hoover era simply couldn't figure out what in the world to do to help anything; so, it was in that era, of course, that Roosevelt decided the only way to finance this, when tax revenues were going down down down down down, was to deficit finance, because it was absolutely essential to put America back to work. The end product was things that were laughed at about the WP A, but all these programs were designed to give people some kind of work.

The concern was not very deep about putting women back to work because not that many women were in the labor force, but, of course, they were very hard hit at home with no income coming in, so there was a great deal of work done in the home. Women canned more, made more of their own clothes, all of these things.

There was no one who was totally unaffected during that era exc~pt, as far as

I could tell, some of the people in the movie industry were doing very well because it was a relief to be able to go to the movies, an escape for a few hours. Apart from the entertainment industry, the economy was bleak.

Now, of course, there were always a few people who were in the class of the

Mellons and others who, even though they were hit, they weren't ruined.

We got through the scene relatively quickly, from the East crash with people jumping out of their office windows and all this sort of thing because they'd been totally wiped out with the collapse of the stock market. It wasn't that obvious in those terms in the far West, but the dismal situation in the country economically could not be missed anyplace.

- 27 - Ms. Edmon: As a child, how aware were you of all of this? Were you aware of what was

going on in the East?

Ms. Hufstedler: Absolutely. We talked a lot about these things at the dinner table. My father,

mother, brother, and I listened to the radio, to the newscast, and, of course,

when we had enough to give a dime to go to the Saturda:y matinee movie,

there were newsreels; so, it was very visible indeed. Moreover, you didn't have

to go very far to see how much stress and unemployment existed. It was

massive. It made a deep impression on me, of course.

Ms. Edmon: In those dinnertime conversations, did your parents talk politics?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they oft times did. Now, my father had grown up in a devoutly

Republican family, and he remained a Republican, but he decided that by the

time the economy began to improve, when President Roosevelt was in office,

he admitted that there was something to that man. [chuckle] I never became a

Republican. I became a Democrat when I was an undergraduate at the

university, but politics, something like religion, is usually passed on, not quite

in the gene pool, but at a very young age.

Ms. Edmon: That didn't seem to work with you.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it didn't, because I read all the time. I didn't see that the Republicans'

appeal to people of wealth was exactly doing the rest of the country a big

favor, so I didn't go for it, and besides I found I was more attracted to the

academic types, who almost all were Democrats and I suppose there was a hint

of just plain rebellion.

- 28 - Ms. Edmon: You mentioned your brother, and you had spoken about him I think in an

earlier session. His name was Kenneth, yes? What is his date ofbirth?

Ms. Hufstedler: He was born in 1922.

Ms. Edmon: What were his politics?

Ms. Hufstedler: He was Republican all his life. He had been groomed to love the Navy by my

father, who was a naval officer during the First World War. My brother

became a naval officer in the submarine service in the Second World War. My

father returned to the service in the Second World War, this time as a Seabee,

a commander. These weren't wonderful places to be--Attu in the Aleutians,

some of the grimmer islands in the Philippines-so his enthusiasm about

returning to the Navy had dimmed very considerably by the time he got back.

My brother was conservative, although he should have been a professor. He

was never cut out to be a first rate businessman. He did go into the

construction business with my father, and he was adequate at it, but that was

not his first love. He stuck with it until he died, but he would have been far

happier as an academic.

Ms. Edmon: What were the names of your father's business?

Ms. Hufstedler: Originally, it was Mead & Mount Construction Company. It was just Earl S.

Mount in Albuquerque until it became Earl S. Mount & Son.

Ms. Edmon: When the business started focusing on residential building, by that point had

everybody really come out of the Depression?

- 29 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it was not completely out, but there was enough recovery that most

people who had any kind of training had jobs. It didn't come back with a rush,

but it did come back sufficiently that most people had an opportunity for

employment and young men were not riding the rails and just bumming around

the country because they couldn't find any work. Now of course there were

still places in the agricultural sector that were hard hit. When Oklahoma

suffered their severe problems during the dustbowl season, there were a lot of

migrant agricultural workers that left because they couldn't make a living, but

overall the economy had definitely improved, and it took a while, but I think,

while many of the programs of the Roosevelt administration were giggled at a

lot, the WP A and things, the WP A, although it didn't pick up the fastest

workers, did give people enough employment to stay alive and to be able to

feed themselves and their families. WP A produced a lot of different things that

turned out to be very worthwhile:

The CCC program, Civilian Conservation Corps, got a lot of young men in

their late teens out of the teeming, crowded places in the East, which were still

struggling so hard with the Depression, and put them to work building roads

and trails and that sort of thing in the western mountains and gave these

youngsters a chance to not only have a job and learn to work, but in an

environment that was a perfectly healthy environment; so, that was a plus.

Ms. Edmon: I'll ask you a tough question and give you time to sip your tea while you think

about it. Of your parents, who would you say had the greater influence on

your ultimate development, and then how would you describe the influence

- 30 - that each one of them had?

Ms. Hufstedler: It's unquestionably true that my mother had the greatest influence on me up

until I was about 13 years old. My father was always expressively fond ofme

and my mother was more like a drill sergeant in many respects than the loving,

cuddly mother type, but I knew I had to obey my mother, and I knew my

father was going to love me unless I did something terrible, so each was a

counterbalance to the other in some ways. I unquestionably spent a lot more

time with my mother, because I was doing chores with her. She taught me a

lot of things, including how to sew, how to bake cakes and make cookies, and

cook, and clean and clean and clean. I've never forgotten those lessons, but I

have given up in the last several years, I no longer do much by way of canning.

I used to do a lot, but I don't now. I've gone through the canning stage. It's

much easier to buy frozen food and things like that, but of course that didn't

exist when I was growing up.

My paternal grandmother was a superb cook. I never saw her use a recipe, but

the way I learned from her was to cook with her, and she could make the most

magnificent kinds of things, from glorious cakes to all kinds of cooking of

game and every imaginable kind of pickle. She stirred things until it was

stirred enough. She would try to explain to me that when it was stirred

enough it was stirred enough. Well, it took some time, because that kind of

oral history of cooking takes a little time to absorb, but it's really learning by

doing it and being with her, so whether it's thick enough or firm enough or

whatever, you just have to figure out how to do that by watching what

- 31 - somebody else does and look at the results.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned cooking last time, but that may not be on tape. You were

describing how cooking is slightly different these days. You mentioned

chickens and turkeys, and you actually had to pluck them?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, you had to kill them as well as pluck them! And as a small child, all that

business, I didn't always have to take the feathers off, but I did have to take all

the pin feathers out. That became kind of tedious, but things were sold in

many of the markets live and, of course, a lot of those birds were brought in

from the farms outside of town still squawking; that's the way you got them.

Ms. Edmon: Who had the responsibility to kill them?

Ms. Hufstedler: Usually momma did or when my grandmother was around my grandmother

killed them. I just couldn't bring myself to run around and chop off a

chicken's head or a turkey's head. They were still squawking! [laughter] Not

me! I could pluck feathers and then of course my father was enthusiastic

about taking my brother hunting, and they would bring back a plethora of

game, all kinds of ducks. Guess who got to pluck the ducks? I did. My

enthusiasm about duck took a very bad tum for the worse, and I've never been

as enthusiastic about duck ever since, but that was the way it was.

There were meat markets, of course, but a great many of those stores at that

time were not chain stores, they were stores owned by a family, and they were

generally small. It was quite novel in Denver when a Piggly Wiggly came to

town, and it was cash-and-carry.

Also, of course, there were produce wagons that ran around on the streets of

- 32 - the town to sell people produce, and the iceman cameth to deliver the ice,

and, of course, that was in the days of iceboxes, not refrigerators; so, you had

to get used to how to keep your foods fresh and how to take the pan, which

was under the icebox, and be sure you spilled it before you found the results all

over the floor. Well, a time or two cleaning up the floor persuaded you that

you ought to look at it promptly, so I did. I thought it was quite thrilling when

we had our first refrigerator.

Ms. Edmon: I'll bet. So did you ever go on the hunting excursions?

Ms. Hufstedler: I never wanted to hunt. My blood thirst is minute. No, indeed, that was not

my dish of tea. I didn't like shooting. I did learn how to use a small rifle to be

able to shoot at cans, because I was expected to learn to aim and hit

something, but a can was my only live victim.

Ms. Edmon: I distracted you from the original question. We were talking about the

influence of your parents, and you said it was your mother primarily up until

13. How about your father?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, he was always a presence. I listened to him, but it was cuddling I got

from him, and he really enjoyed watching me dance, among other things. I

think my mother did too, but she was not given very much to praise.

Ms. Edmon: I think we're up to high school.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yay!

Ms. Edmon: In terms of high school, what sort of--were the extracurricular activities

essentially as you told us about before?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, although I added others. By the time I was in junior high school, I was

- 33 - learning how to write for school newspapers and editing school newspapers, and I did some work as a copy reader in the regular newspapers too. But, I was interested in writing, and by the time I was in high school, I did a lot of writing, and I was editor of the high school newspaper. I later became the editor of the major publication at the University ofNew Mexico that the students did.

So, I continued to write all this time, and I continued to play. I played in combos. I played all kinds of stuff. I vacillated between playing popular music

and playing classical music, but I really played a lot more classical than I did

popular music until I was in college. Then there was a lot more demand for

persons who could be accompaniment for persons who sang and that kind of

thing, so I did a lot of that.

I had been active since I was in junior high school as a swimmer and a diver. I

did a great deal of diving competitions and swimming competitions. I was not

ever more than enough to hit a ball across a net as a tennis player, but tennis

was not very big at that time. Of course during the Depression, unless you

were in the film industry, one didn't have access to tennis courts.

The primary employment of people so far as entertainment was concerned was

what you made up yourself I had always played a lot of cards with my family,

and I played a lot of cards when I was in junior high school, high school, and

college. Primarily they were simpler games when I was in junior high school,

but we concentrated on bridge when I was in college, so I played a great deal

ofbridge. I enjoyed it; we had a good time doing that. We didn't have the

- 34 - kinds of entertainments that are evident today.

Also, by the time I was in high school, we were beginning to be at war. My

father was off to the war, my brother was off to the war, and there were lots of

young people who had already been taken into the service, so it was a very

different scene. By the time I was in college, there were a number of programs

for training military officers-to-be that were on the campus. There was also an

enormous air force base, which was head-over-teacup with officers and

soldiers who were pilots or who were studying to be bombardiers.

There were plenty of male persons around, to put it mildly, even though the

number of male students was diminished very significantly -- that is, male

students who were not in the military. There was always plenty of activity.

There were dances and there were all sorts of things. There was not a

question of having all the young women at the campus believe they would

never have a date; they had lots of dates, in fact, they had more than they

probably should have. However, in those days nice girls didn't do things that

went very much beyond what momma would have expected, and we didn't. It

just wasn't done, but that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy having a smooch from

time to time with one ofmy boyfriends, because I did.

Ms. Edmon: When did the first boyfriend come along -- in high school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I had on-and-offboyfriends when I was in high school. I had no

particularly overwhelming interest in any one boy. I belonged to the Rainbow

Girls by that time, and I had to have somebody to invite to the Rainbow Girls'

dances. They were very prim, chaperoned affairs, but it was at that time quite

- 35 - difficult to find a boy who was attractive who either (a) knew how to dance, or

(b) was even willing to try, so the pickings were somewhat, shall I say, slim. I

had more boy friends than I did boyfriends. Working as I did in the

newspaper, there were always quite a few young men in high school. In

college, they were all so busy in the service they didn't have much time to do

writing on newspapers.

There was plenty of activity on campus, but I was not interested in dawdling

through my undergraduate work. I finished that in three years, but I was very

young when I got out, because I graduated from college when I was 19.

During that period, I was also teaching. I had learned shorthand and I learned

to type very rapidly. Part of the time ... I decided when I was a senior in

college that I would-I was asked to and I did-make a swap. I taught

English and business letter writing in the commercial schoo 1 and in return I

was not paid, but I was given lessons in court reporting. Now, at that time

there were no stenotype machines or anything, you did that by hand.

Ms. Edmon: Court reporters actually took down notes by hand?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, of course! And I could do it. I could do 275 words a minute in

Gregg shorthand and actually it turned out to be very handy in many ways,

because I spent a great deal of time early in my practice in law libraries, and I

could write the quotations from the opinions I wanted to use in shorthand. It

also was very handy when I was a Superior Court judge, because as I would

be sitting at trial, if there was a piece of testimony that I was very interested in,

I would simply take it down verbatim, but nobody in the courtroom would

- 36 - know, because I didn't have to ask the court reporter what was said; so, that

turned out to be useful, and I still use bits of it from time to time, but not like I

used to.

Ms. Edmon: So, in all those years of schooling, how would you describe your grades, at

every level?

Ms. Hufstedler: Very, very high. I think I had one B when I was a high school student, and I

think I might have had a B when I was an undergraduate. I had a B when I

was in law school.

Ms. Edmon: [laughter] That qualifies as pretty high!

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, when I attended Stanford Law School, this was the first class that

entered at the end of the Second World War, so it was the largest class that

was ever admitted to try to help all of those veterans, and at that time,

therefore, there was a lot of struggling for grades. I struggled too, and by the

time I graduated, my husband, Seth, was first in the class (I wasn't married to

him then), and I was fifth. Warren Christopher and I were tied for fifth place.

We worked at it.

Ms. Edmon: Who were the teachers who had the most influence on you and why?

Ms. Hufstedler: I'm not so sure who had which influence. I had several professors I genuinely

liked. I was interested in anthropology, and there was a professor of

anthropology named Dr. Hibben who was first rate. I enjoyed his teaching

very much. Then we had, because of the war situation, substitutes because so

many of the people who would ordinarily have been professors were off to the

war, so there was quite a bit of substitute teaching. The people who probably

- 37 - had the ablest reputations were probably not there, and since my father wanted

me to get a business degree, which I did, the number of people who were

particularly inspired teachers who would be teaching in a business scene were

mostly the economists and a lot of others, so the teaching was quite, shall I

say, it was underwhelming. Not that they didn't care about doing it, but they

were not ... there were a lot of them who had simply been called back to

teach because the university was desperate to get somebody who had an

adequate degree, but who had very little teaching experience. It was an

unusual scene at the university, but they were unusual times.

Ms. Edmon: Again, up through those college years, can you identify any awards, honors or

prizes you received?

Ms. Hufstedler: I had most of them. [ chuckles] They didn't have things like Phi Beta Kappa,

but I had a substitute honorary society. Phi Beta Kappa didn't reach the

University of New Mexico until after I graduated, but I was always in the top

of the class in almost everything. I didn't always do brilliantly in gym.

Ms. Edmon: Which years were your father and brother gone?

Ms. Hufstedler: They were both gone the entire time I was in college, and my brother was in

training for the submarine service while I was still in high school. My father

had gone, so he wasn't there. He left before I graduated from high school.

Ms. Edmon: How did that affect your mother?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, she put up with it because she was a strong woman; that's what

everybody was doing. She didn't consider herself in any respect unique, and

she wasn't. She felt that my father was going to be safer than most because he

- 38 - was in the construction battalion, so he was not in the front line of fire. The

people who were in the submarine service came out well and whole if they

came back.

Ms. Edmon: Now, that was your brother, your brother was in the submarines?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: The construction battalion, what did that mean?

Ms. Hufstedler: They built. They were building airfields in places all over the Aleutians and in

the South Pacific and various kinds of quarters that went with it, hangars, all

the military equipment that had to be there; so, it was a very active, productive

kind of work, but hardly under conditions that were entirely enjoyable, and, of

course, they were attacked from time to time by aircraft. They were not

ground attacked.

Ms. Edmon: The University of New Mexico was right at home, right in your backyard. Is

that why you went there?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Did you ever think about going anywhere else?

Ms. Hufstedler: It would have been out of the question. I didn't have any money.

Ms. Edmon: Did you live at home?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I belonged to a sorority, but I didn't live at the sorority house.

Ms. Edmon: What year did you start if you graduated at age 19? How old were you?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was 16 when I entered my undergraduate work.

Ms. Edmon: Did you know what you wanted to do, what you wanted your major to be?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I didn't believe I had much choice, because my father was very, very

- 39 - insistent that I get a business degree, but I assure you I did not want to spend

my life in that kind ofbusiness. I was interested in medicine, but my

undergraduate degree did not prepare me to go to medical school. I would

have had to do my undergraduate work all over again, and I couldn't afford it,

and it seemed a waste of time. I became interested in law, because, taking a

business degree, I took several courses in business law. It seemed to go down

very easily, so I thought, well, that seems like a good idea and besides, that's

three years, that's not half a century, and ifl got a job after college I could

save up enough to go to law school. I had a good friend, a male, who was

going to go to Stanford Law School, who was a classmate of mine at the

University ofNew Mexico. I had visited the Stanford campus when I was a

youngster living in California, and I thought it was a beautiful campus; so, I

thought, now that would be nice, and it was handy enough to San Francisco,

and that impressed me as favorable, and it had an excellent reputation, and I

thought that was good, so Stanford Law School was the only law school to

which I applied, and I was accepted very promptly.

Ms. Edmon: It's the only school you applied to?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right, being very naive about such things at the time. It didn't occur to

me to be at all surprised that, while I entered law school in this very, very large

class, five women entered, that was all, and three of them dropped out after

the first year. They were not academically disqualified, they decided they

didn't like it; so, they quit. Another woman and I graduated from law school,

buf as nearly as my friend and I could ascertain, there were seven ofus females

- 40 - in the State of California who were admitted to the bar in 1949.

Ms. Edmon: OK, I'm going to stick with college just for a minute before we head to law

school. When your father was urging you to go to business school, do you

think he wanted you to go to law school, and was he ultimately thinking of you

as ...

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it never entered his mind that I was going to go to law school. Women

didn't! What women did was you taught school "genteelly" for a while or you

could work in somebody's business office for a while, and then you got

married and you had children and you stayed home.

Ms. Edmon: You had mentioned before, and again this is something that may not be on tape

so I don't want to miss it: in talking about the boys or men who were at the

local base where you lived in New Mexico, you had some favorites who were

Yugoslavians, I think?

Ms. Hufstedler: They weren't favorites, but I had a lot ofboyfriends there, and many of them

became life-long friends. Among the things that we did was to put together

entertainment for young men who were from other countries who were

training to be pilots or bombardiers and so forth, and among that group was a

group of about ten Yugoslavian officers. They were already officers, and

several ofus girls put together a party for these men. They were quite

intrigued with us, so we would go out with them. I thought they were

hilarious, but they were really quite shocking when one of them finally said to

me, [heavily accented] "you go out to bowling with one, you go out to dinner

with another, which one do you sleep with?" That was absolutely out of the

- 41 - question, of course! They had no more idea about what a dating system was in

the United States at that time than they would know how to identify a striped

bird of some kind. They just didn't have any idea about it. We always went

out in groups, so there was no real concern about it, but we thought it was

funny and they were shocked. [laughter]

Ms. Edmon: This was during college?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, while I was an undergraduate in college.

Ms. Edmon: And as I recall, ultimately you all got some benefits out of this because they all

had extra rations for gasoline?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, my mother would invite many of the youngsters over for a picnic in our

back garden or for Sunday dinner, and all this was made possible because at

the time, as we knew only too well, meat was rationed. Butter was rationed.

Fuel was rationed. You had to have your little coupons before you could get

anything, so, because the young men could buy all these things and had things

at the base, they would bring my mother butter and all these marvelous things,

which we hadn't been able to get for months. So, as a return favor, my mother

would feed a lot of them, and they had a very good time being in a home and

enjoying home cooking and all that. She and we benefited, and they did too.

It was a nice arrangement.

- 42 - Ms. Edmon: At some point, you decided to go to law school. Was it during your senior

year?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I decided ... I thought I would probably like to go to law school, but

wherever I was going to go to graduate school, I wanted to go to graduate

school in any event. That seemed the most logical graduate school to me, but

I was going to have to go to work. I had to save my money.

I mentioned that Ernie Pyle and I had become very good friends. He was my

best grownup friend. They were going to do a film about Ernie, and Burgess

Meredith was selected to play the part of Ernie, so Burgess came to

Albuquerque, where I first met him, and, as matters developed, he was then

married to Paulette Goddard. When I came to Los Angeles, Burgess asked me

to lunch one day and I met Paulette Goddard and they offered me a job as their

secretary; so, I went to work at Paramount as a secretary for Meredith and for

her, which was very nice, because the job paid me more than I was being

offered anyplace else. While it sounds like peanuts today, $85 a week at that

time was a substantial wage for a working young woman. I could save with

that, and did, so I could save up enough to be able to defray what then was

modest tuition.

Ms. Edmon: Now this was after college and before law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, I'd graduated.

Ms. Edmon: So did you stay there for a year?

Ms. Hufstedler: I stayed there for about 16 months, and then I toodled off to law school.

Ms. Edmon: Was there an LSAT then?

- 43 - Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: How did you get in to law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: I applied.

Ms. Edmon: So just purely on your graduate grades and ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, on my record, and I seemed not to have any conspicuous warts that were

too large on my nose.

Ms. Edmon: During law school did you have favorite classes?

Ms. Hufstedler: I felt most of them were interesting. I enjoyed torts a lot my first year oflaw

school, but as you well recall, your first year oflaw school you're learning

vocabulary and concepts, and at least concepts with respect to tort cases were

far more familiar territory to me than shifting uses and some of the other, more

esoteric areas of real property law, particularly as it was developed in old

England. All the courses had some interest. Some of them were better taught

than others.

I thought my beginning constitutional law class was fascinating, but first you

have to learn how the whole set of principles is put together, besides learning

specifics of vocabulary that are not used generally outside the legal profession.

One had to learn enough about basic procedure to figure out what was going

on, and it is a different set of skills one has to learn by trying to find out what

the law is by reading case books. It is not a tale that begins "once upon a

time" and ends with "lived happily ever after." You have to learn how the law

is put together, and that, I thought, was a rather entertaining concept. It's a

very different set of skills, but I thought it was very interesting.

- 44 - By the time I was in my second year, I had been chosen, on the basis of

grades, as had my companions, to begin the law review. We began it with an

intramural law review. There were two persons who were chosen from

Stanford to run that program as well as teaching other classes. One was John

McDonough and the other was Charles Corker. We came to know them

very, very well, and we put together and put out the first intramural law

review, then Seth and I became officers of this first law review, for volume I

number I ...

Ms. Edmon: Really, the very first volume?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. He was legislation editor, I was article and book review editor. Warren

Christopher was president, and the others are no longer with us, but, needless

to say, we came to know each other extremely well because we spent all

kinds ofhours in law review.

Ms. Edmon: Any other women? Were you the only woman that made it?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. Just one. There was only one other woman in my law school class, and

she didn't make it! [laughter]

Ms. Edmon: Let me just ask you to backtrack. In terms of college, do you know what the

percentage of women versus men was in your college?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it's very difficult to state anything that's very relevant to anything,

because there were a lot of men on campus, but they were in military

programs. The number of men who were on campus who were not trying to

teach and who were not in some role of service personnel was minute, those

who had some kind of serious physical disability or something like that; so,

- 45 - the number of men on the campus was really quite a lot, but they were not

students as the girls were.

Ms. Edmon: In law school, how would you describe the atmosphere for you as a woman?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, to begin with, it was a little iffy, and also to begin with, the law

professors didn't have any trouble at all saying things like "and what would

the reasonable woman do, Miss Mount?" Now, needless to say, that would

not go over very well today, but I wasn't astonished by it and it didn't bother

me any. I didn't feel any hostility from them. I think it was more a matter of

baffled curiosity.

Ms. Edmon: From both professors and the other students?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, my relationship with my other students was much more normalized, but

I think that after the first few weeks, my fellow law students got used to the

fact that I was (a) a law student, and (b) female. I didn't take any pains to

conceal the fact that I was female, and I was just treated as another student.

There was a big difference in those days from what the relations are and what

is expected of the scene in the last, say, fifteen, twenty years in law schools,

because everybody there-I can't think of an exception-had done a lot of

other things besides being in school before they showed up in law school.

95% of the class had just left service, some of them had been out for five

years or more, and others had had, because of the Depression and so forth,

jobs before they ever went to law school, so it was not a young class. It was

not like young people, who, for quite a few years, went to law school because

they couldn't fail to keep moving on the escalator; if they ever got off

- 46 - they'd've been drafted. It was the way it was.

I never thought it was fair, because the youngsters who hadn't had either the

training or the money to go to college were the ones who were snapped up

for the service in some of the capacities that were very dangerous, but that's

the way it was at the time, and I have to also say that I wasn't surprised that

that's the way it was, because the kind of demeaning racial and country-of­

origin epithets; things I'd heard all my life. I heard them all, I just never met

anybody I thought they applied to, because I couldn't imagine calling

anybody a kike or a pollack, or whatever, a spic. That sort of thing is not

only uncivil, it's cruel, and I just don't believe in it at all.

My husband's the same way. When my husband and his late law partner,

Chuck Beardsley, decided they wanted to hire the first black in a downtown

Los Angeles firm, they went on quite a look and found, to everybody's joy,

Sam Williams. Seth would just completely forget that Sam had a different

color of skin than him. They were watching a baseball game one time on

television together, and Seth looked very earnestly at Sam and said, "Sam,

does it do any good to put that black stuff under your eyes?" Sam completely

broke up, and then he realized Seth never saw the color at all! [laughter] It

was a great ice breaker. Neither Seth nor I see color.

Ms. Edmon: Just to divert for a minute, you mentioned that a lot of the other law students

had had jobs for years, and you I think again mentioned perhaps off record

that you had had jobs for years. Maybe you could just run through what your

work experience was over the years.

- 47 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I could find some kind of job and had since I was thirteen years old. At

that tender age, mostly it was babysitting, but before long I found out I could

do things for other people that would pay me a little money. Sometimes I

was an assistant to a teacher who was teaching piano, who could use me to

take on the youngest children, and give the easiest lessons to, for which I got

a very modest compensation. Then I did some things for nothing-I sold

daffodils from door-to-door for the church for their fundraising. I sold Girl

Scout cookies door to door.

When I was in high school, I worked as a floorwalker and a clerk in a dime

store, and later in a department store, and I did some teaching, but I had been

. . . and I worked for a statistical company going from door to door

gathering information, so I learned how to do that. I hadn't really lacked

experience on being able to take on strange jobs; go ahead and learn 'em and

do 'em. You couldn't be a shrinking violet when you wanted to go on with

life as I did. Nobody came to hand you a job in those days, you had to create

one.

By the time I was an undergrad in college, of course, I'd had enough

experience on newspapers that I could do some of the routine things on the

daily newspapers in the city. Every one of those experiences I thought taught

me something, and I've always found it important until very recently.

Whatever thejob was, I wanted to learn how to do it, so even when I was

first in law practice with my own one-room law office, I learned how to run

the pegboard you'd use for fielding phone calls at that time. Whatever it was,

- 48 - I just went ahead and figured out how to do it, because there was no extra

help. If you weren't going to learn to do that, you were going to be stuck

with not being able to do anything, because if that person was gone at some

moment, you couldn't receive phone calls. I never studied to be an elevator

operator, but I had enough time going down in my life that I thought being an

up-and-down business was not really what I had in mind! There were all

kinds of jobs.

Ms. Edmon: How were you able to pay for Stanford? Were there scholarships available?

Ms. Hufstedler: I had a scholarship in my last semester, excuse me, quarter-it was in the

quarter system then-but law school was not very expensive at the time. It

was $250 a quarter. Of course, it's up to the rafters now, but it would have

been pointless to try to charge more than that, because people couldn't pay it.

There was no such thing as a student loan; they didn't exist until many years

later. And of course lawyers in those days, with rare exceptions, even when

in practice didn't earn very much money. For a place like Palo Alto, it was

$10 an hour. Beginning associates were expected to work virtually for

nothing. My husband was first in the class and got the heaviest paying job, he

got $275 a month. Remember, of course, at that time downtown law offices

not only could but did serve the needs of middle income people. Law office

space was $8 a foot. The big expense for all the equipment was a standard

typewriter and sometimes a small, old-fashioned kind of dictating equipment.

Ms. Edmon: A different world.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yeah, wildly different, and litigation in the terms of lawsuits was at a level

- 49 - which would be unbelievable today. Frank Belcher, who was one of the

biggest trial lawyers in California at the time, came back one day. We were

having lunch with him. He said he'd just lost the biggest case verdict there

had been in Los Angeles County, $150,000!

You can't translate the world of the law in metropolitan areas today to what

it was, and of course the first year salaries of new associates in major

downtown law firms is creeping up to exceed that of Federal judges and

Superior Court judges. And why is that happening? Because the competition

is national, and because the young people who come out oflaw schools now

have such a heavy debt burden from government loans, unless they come

from an independently wealthy family. They have to earn that much money in

order to be able to survive. In the meantime, instead oflaw practice being

local or, in some occasions regional and only by very rare circumstances

national, since we have been woven together in the world multinationally and

by the digital revolution, it's a completely different scene.

Ms. Edmon: During law school, when you were there, were judicial clerkships available?

Ms. Hufstedler: I knew of none. Warren Christopher, who was the then-dean's pet and

favorite -for good reason-was the only one who got a clerkship, and he

had one with William 0. Douglas. Bill Douglas and I later became good

friends, but I knew all the people on the U.S. Supreme Court for many, many

years very well, and nobody heard ofit. Most Federal courts had a very few

clerks. I don't recall at that time that district judges had any. The U.S.

Supreme Court did, but clerkships were very rare birds at the.time. It was so

- 50 - rare that the notion that anybody'd have a significant step up in law practice if

you had a clerkship didn't exist. It was a wildly different scene, but then,

look at everything else.

Ms. Edmon: Did you work between your first and second or second and third years oflaw

school?

Ms. Hufstedler: I always had some kind of a job, but it was a very menial one, because I

needed the money. I didn't take a vacation between the first and second

years oflaw school. I just went right straight through. It seemed to me that

that was the most expeditious way to get the job done, and it was.

Ms. Edmon: Why do you think you didn't face the same hostilities in law school that I've

heard from so many other women who went to law school in the early years

and had so few women in their classes?

Ms. Hufstedler: I think because of the time in the history of the country that I was there.

Everybody-I can't think of one otherwise--in that first year at Stanford

Law School had been exposed to an enormous number of different human

beings and different places under sometimes circumstances that were very

perilous, and the notion that there was some kind ofreason to jibe at females

or to jibe at somebody whose face did not look l~e your mother's next door

neighbor simply didn't occur. They were all very eager to get through that

experience and they, for the most part ... oh, there was some jibing around,

but that was between the men. I was never the subject of anything like that.

The men were always very nice to me. But I think they had realized that

being respectful and decent to other people is not simply a set of manners, it's

- 51 - a way of life; therefore, they behaved that way. There was not an incident I

can remember in which any fellow law student was making noises to me that

were anything other than the same kind of noises they made to their

classmates otherwise.

Ms. Edmon:· I am dying to know whether you started dating Seth in law school, but that

story will wait until the next tape! Hah!

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, you've got a ways to go!

END OF SESSION

- 52 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

THIRD INTERVIEW

January 13, 2007

This is the third interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on January 13, 2007.

Ms. Edmon: We're going to get started. It is Saturday, January 13, 2007, and we're in the

home of the Honorable Shirley Hufstedler. So why don't we get started?

Ms. Hufstedler: Sure, just go ahead and ask what you want to.

Ms. Edmon: OK, you know, we left off at law school, although I realized when I went

back over the transcript that I had never asked what your degree was from

the University ofNew Mexico.

Ms. Hufstedler: Bachelor of Business Administration.

Ms. Edmon: And you received that in 1945?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. No, I'm wrong, it was earlier than that, it was ... actually I finished in

1943, but I got my degree in the spring of 1944 when everybody else was

graduating.

Ms. Edmon: Oh, is that right? OK. Great, so you got the degree in 1944, and then you

worked for a while.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I was an executive secretary for a couple of movie stars.

Ms. Edmon: Right, and I think we talked about that, and then you went ... so what year

did you start law school?

- 53 - Ms. Hufstedler: 1946. Excuse me, 1945. It was the very first class after the end of the

Second World War. In fact, virtually everybody in the class was on military

terminal leave.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned that there were two women in the class ...

Ms. Hufstedler: There were five of us to begin with, but three of them dropped out after the

first year, because they decided they didn't like it. They were not

academically disqualified; they wanted to do something else with their lives.

Ms. Edmon: How many men were there? What was the size of the class?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, it was very large. I could only hazard a guess now because I can't

remember exactly. There were almost 300 ofus.

Ms. Edmon: Oh, that was a really large class.

Ms. Hufstedler: So, they ran double sessions.

Ms. Edmon: You talked about the fact that you were on law review ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I was article and book review editor of volume one number one of the

Stanford Law Review.

Ms. Edmon: What other activities did you do during law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I spent some time working to pay my way. I had a scholarship during

my last semester, because I was staying a little longer to finish my work on

the law review, and ...

Ms. Edmon: Did you actually work during law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Part of the time.

Ms. Edmon: What kind of jobs?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was babysitting, because I could baby-sit for the most part and continue to

- 54 - study.

Ms. Edmon: And during the summers, between your years oflaw school?

Ms. Hufstedler: I just went straight through.

Ms. Edmon: Aah, so there was no summer off for you?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: So there were year-round classes?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, in those days there were, because the men had been gone for so long.

Of course, the class was much older than a class ordinarily would be going to

law schoo 1, and people wanted to get on with their lives.

Ms. Edmon: So was it a three-year ...

Ms. Hufstedler: A three-year course, yes.

Ms. Edmon: And what ... were there some teachers that were more influential as far as

you were concerned than others?

Ms. Hufstedler: Some were more, of course, influential. A contracts professor named Hurlbut

was a splendid teacher, and I liked him very much. There were some others

that were very good too. And then they had the class curmudgeon, Professor

Osborne, who could intimidate men who'd been in combat for years to the

point they'd be shaking in their shoes.

Ms. Edmon: What did he teach?

Ms. Hufstedler: He taught property.

Ms. Edmon: Were there any women professors?

Ms. Hufstedler: None. Of course, the pickings for females in the legal profession were

extremely slim at the time. Indeed, when I took and passed the bar and was

- 55 - admitted to the bar in January 1950, all we could count were seven women in

the state who passed the bar. Of course, there weren't that terribly many law

schools then either. What happened was the same thing that happened after

every major crisis in the United States during a war: the women were all told

to leave their homes and go do the work outside their homes, and when the

war was over, they were all told massively that they should go home and

breed, and they should never take jobs that men could do, and that was the

same thing that happened after the Second World War.

Ms. Edmon: When you were thinking about law school, did anybody encourage you to go?

Ms. Hufstedler: I had a friend who was going to law school, a male, and he encouraged me,

but nobody else did. But after I had fulfilled my father's wish that I have a

business degree, I got interested in law when I took business law courses, and

I found it entertaining and I enjoyed it and did well in it; so, I thought, well, I

was interested in science, but, of course, with that kind of an undergraduate

degree, ifl were going to go into science I'd have to start my undergraduate

work virtually all over again.

Ms. Edmon: Did anybody discourage you?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. They thought it was odd is all.

Ms. Edmon: Did you know any lawyers before you started law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Only my father's lawyer, who was not a "good buddy." It just seemed to me

an interesting occupation.

Ms. Edmon: Do you have any memories oflaw school, stories that you want to share?

- 56 - Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I have lots of memories oflaw school. Of course, in those days

professors didn't mind in the least saying things that now would get them

enjoined from other people, like, in torts, "And what would the reasonable

woman do, Miss Mount," things like that, but I was treated with some degree

of respect.

Ms. Edmon: Overall, did you enjoy law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, enjoy is not quite the right word. I enjoyed it part of the time, but it

was a lot of very hard work, of course.

Ms. Edmon: Did you have good friends that you can remember?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, I had lots of friends at the time. One of the seniors a year before me,

a classmate, Morton Silvers, was a very good friend, and we had other

friends, Warren Christopher, for example, who later became Secretary of

State of the United States. He was on the law review also, and we were close

friends. We still are. And I had quite a few others.

Ms. Edmon: Were you friends with Seth at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: We knew each other, but we didn't really get cozy with each other until we

were in our third year oflaw school. We shared an office, and, of course, we

were working on the law review until all hours. We did our courtship after

midnight.

Ms. Edmon: Did you start dating him during your third year oflaw school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and we decided that was a good idea all the way around.

Ms. Edmon: At graduation, what was your standing in the class?

- 57 - Ms. Hufstedler: I was fifth in the class. Seth was first. Warren Christopher and I were tied

for fifth place in the class.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think anything about law school affected your overall philosophy?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I just think I looked more meticulously at some issues than I earlier had,

and I certainly knew a great deal more about cause and effect that I had not

learned and all the exciting things that happened to Mrs. Pfalsgraf on her

most exciting day. Of course, I did not get myself totally fascinated by the

intricacies of common law property law, the idea of worrying about springing

uses was not a handy thing, I just ... let me jump with joy, springing I didn't

do.

Ms. Edmon: After law school, what happened next?

Ms. Hufstedler: The law school gave me one recommendation. Seth ... he was on his own.

My friend, Warren Christopher, was recommended to be a Supreme Court

clerk, and he was, but what I was recommended for by the law school was to

be a probate secretary in a law firm in Santa Barbara, which was not exactly

what I had in mind.

Ms. Edmon: When you say the law school ''recommended," what does that mean?

Somebody in the law scho.ol recommended you for that job?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I think that the dean recommended me for being a legal secretary, and I

said, ''No thanks," but then, what may startle people today is that nobody

would hire a female lawyer. Nobody. Of course, the profession at that time

was far more segregated in every way than one would imagine now. There

was no lawyer of color in a public law office, the only women in any law

- 58 - office were those few that were hired during the Second World War, when

the men were gone. None of them was ever made a partn~r no matter how

good they were. And, of course, Gentiles were not in Jewish law firms and

the other way around; so, it was just completely segregated. Of course, the

legal profession has changed vastly since those many years ago, but the lack

of segregation oflawyers is a joy to me. I'm very pleased about that. Of

course, there were some good things about it too, because downtown law

firms could and did represent middle income people all the time. That's not

possible anymore. It either has to be pro bono or very wealthy clients; So,

that's bad news.

Ms. Edmon: What about the bar exam? Can you describe that experience?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I studied for it, but we didn't take a bar review course. My husband

and I'd just gotten married in August, and we went to a cabin my mother-in­

law owned in the Sierras, and we studied for the bar there. And ifwe

studied, we crammed enough into it so that ifwe could cover enough courses

in one or two days, we would then take a holiday and go fishing for a day; so,

we managed to pass the bar handily.

Ms. Edmon: So you were married the August after you graduated from law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, August 24, 1949.

Ms. Edmon: So you graduated from law school in 1949 ...

Ms. Hufstedler: ... got married in August of 1949 ...

Ms. Edmon: ... and the bar exam was when?

Ms. Hufstedler: As I recall, it was early October, but Seth in the meantime couldn't have

- 59 - taken the bar review course, because he was still in the Naval Reserve, and he

was on duty in Washington. Among his many talents, Seth is also a

cryptanalyst, and he was on a small team breaking Japanese codes during the

Second World War.

Ms. Edmon: So, he was still involved in doing some of that after law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, as a Reserve officer, he was called back to Washington, and he was

there for several weeks instead of studying for the bar; so, we decided ifwe

could do at least one monthly unit course in one morning, we can do two in a

day, we would get through the whole thing, and he even gave me a course in

future interests, which I hadn't had, in one day. It turned out that when I

read the question, it seemed so simple, I thought I'd missed the boat. It

turned out that was the question, but I didn't know, so I took another

question. It's always a bit hairy waiting for the results, but it all went fine.

Ms. Edmon: Back then the bar exam was one day?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, as I remember, it was three days.

Ms. Edmon: And then you had to wait about how long for the results?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, we waited until the end of December.

Ms. Edmon: So it was just the two of you studying together? It wasn't like you got

together with a group of people?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, we just did it ourselves.

Ms. Edmon: How'd you decide to come to Los Angeles?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, that looked like the best opportunity to me. My husband's family had

lived in Bakersfield. He grew up in Bakersfield after he lived as a very small

- 60 - child in Oklahoma, and he had offers for jobs there, but it didn't seem that

there was much opportunity in the long run, particularly not for any females;

so, we decided to moved to Los Angeles.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about how you decided to get a job. What did you do?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, nobody would hire me, so I just created my own job. I went to see a

very fine lawyer who was a graduate of Stanford Law School, a solo

practitioner named J.E. Simpson, and I started just working for him doing

legal memoranda, and then I graduated quickly to writing briefs. Ultimately, I

had a lot oflawyers for whom I wrote briefs. I wrote briefs anonymously so

many times I thought I was made out of ectoplasm-I spent a lot of time at

the County Law Library, and eventually I became very well known for brief

writing.

Then a real break came, because one ofmy former law professors at

Stanford, Prof Corker, had left law school and had been hired by the

Attorney General's office to be in a senior position with respect to the

litigation, Arizona v. California, which was pending in original jurisdiction in

the Supreme Court, of course, because there were multiple states as parties

and the United States was a party; so, he called me. He knew I was doing

research and writing briefs, and he asked me to do some research memos for

the case, and then I began writing briefs and also doing things to prepare

expert witnesses' examinations; so, finally, I was writing lots of things, such

as I made up the Housewife's Guide to Hydrology, which I wrote, but, as you

know, it was always better to have the expert answer the questions without

- 61 - me displaying all the knowledge and have the lawyer do a lot of preparation

to make the expert's testimony clear, and then I gradually moved up to the

point I was one of the team of brief writers for that case. There were four of

us, for the Supreme Court; for the special master first, then for the Supreme

Court. At that time, I was made special legal consultant to the Attorney

General of California, and at that time the Attorney General of California was

Edmund G. "Pat" Brown. That's how this all began.

Ms. Edmon: I'm beginning to see the connection. Now, that was in 1960? Is that about

right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: During the period that you were doing this brief writing, were you what we

now consider to be an associate in a firm?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I was by myself, and then I became pregnant, and I closed my downtown

one-room law office. I also had my one-room office--lots of other lawyers

gave me cases that they didn't particularly want to do, so I got plenty of time

in courts trying cases. I also volunteered a half day a week to the Legal Aid

Society of Los Angeles, and that was a very useful experience all the way

around. I learned a lot in interviewing clients and talking to the lawyers who

were doing all this work. It was a very small office at that time, and the

people were very able and dedicated. I've always been deeply grateful and

fond of Legal Aid Foundation for that.

- 62 - Ms. Edmon: It's the same Legal Aid Foundation that I'm familiar with now?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, except, of course, it's much bigger today.

Ms. Edmon: All this period from essentially 1950 to 1960, would you describe yourself as

a sole practitioner or did you work with other lawyers?

Ms. Hufstedler: That is right. For other lawyers, but I was doing my own law practice as

well.

Ms. Edmon: You had your own office then in downtown LA?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I did, one room.

Ms. Edmon: And what was Seth doing at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: He was an associate with Charles Beardsley, who was a very well known

lawyer, very able lawyer, and before too many years Chuck Beardsley had

decided to create a partnership, so Seth became a partner, along with Helen

Kimball, who was a probate lawyer; so, it became Beardsley, Hufstedler &

Kimball.

Ms. Edmon: What kinds of cases did you handle when you were actually doing work for

your own clients?

Ms. Hufstedler: I did a lot of different kinds of cases. Of course, at that time we still had a

municipal court, so there were lots oflawyers who really didn't want to do

that work. Sometimes, there were cases involving landlord/tenant litigation,

collection problems, family law, some probate items; so, I did all those things.

Ms. Edmon: During that period 1950-1960, can you identify any strong influences in your

life?

Ms. Hufstedler: My husband, Seth, of course, and his partner, Chuck Beardsley, and my initial

- 63 - mentor, J.E. Simpson. J.E. Simpson was an excellent lawyer, and he's one

man that I really admired for many years because he was not only very

capable, but he could create transcripts from-he was questioning witnesses,

all that sort of thing-in which you could hear a comma fall everywhere it

ought to. There were no dangling participles, nothing of that kind, he simply

orally was superb.

Ms. Edmon: So, he was a trial lawyer?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: What kinds of cases did he ...

Ms. Hufstedler: He also had appellate cases. He had all kinds oflitigation.

Ms. Edmon: Any particular area of practice he focused on?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, just all kinds of complicated cases.

Ms. Edmon: Those were the people you described as your mentors during that period?

Ms. Hufstedler: If there was any mentoring to be done, I suppose they were it. There wasn't

much mentoring going on at that time. It was really just "go in there and sink

or swim on your own."

Ms. Edmon: What about judges? Any particular judges you remember from that period?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't remember too many of them. Of course, I got to know most of

them-the bench was not that big at the time-Joe Vickers was one, and

Arnold Praeger was a good friend. He became a social friend as well as a law

friend. Frank Belcher, well he wasn't on the bench, but he was a very

distinguished lawyer. To just show how times have changed, I remember

when we saw Frank for lunch one day, he was jumping around saying, "This

- 64 - is awful." He'd just lost the biggest case that had ever been lost in Los

Angeles County, $150,000.

Ms. Edmon: What about women? Were there any women practicing in Los Angeles at the

time?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was a member of what was then the Women Lawyers Club. It had a

hundred members, although very few of them were practicing law anymore.

They had retired when they'd gotten married, but there were a few that

actually practiced, and I liked them, but it wasn't exactly what you'd call a

huge crowd.

Ms. Edmon: Was there an active LA County Bar at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, but at that time, women were not permitted to join the LA County Bar.

Ms. Edmon: Do you recall when that changed?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't remember the exact date, but it was in the early 60s.

Ms. Edmon: Amazing. How would you describe your work habits when you were an

attorney?

Ms. Hufstedler: Hard, because that's the way it is. I did a great deal of research and study all

the time, and the Los Angeles County Law Library was my home away from

home for quite a while. But there were elements in which there was genuine

humor. Herman Selvin was a wonderful lawyer, and Herman and I were on

the opposite sides of a case in which I was on the side of Chuck Beardsley

and Seth. They were representing Mary Pickford, and he was representing

the heirs of Douglas Fairbanks. The litigation was over the rights to the

movie studio, which had been owned by the two of them when they were

- 65 - married. Well, it turned out that they were tenants-in-common. What I

discovered soon was that those property rights were controlled by the

"Statute of Anne," which was passed in England in the 19th Century, early in

the 19th Century, so it was necessary to find out what the law was as it was

interpreted in England in those days as the Statute of Anne;

so, Herman and I ended up in the County Law Library, because the only place

you could go read those cases was in the County Law Library, which had all

of the old English reports. We were very scientific, I might say, because he

soon found out that the way he could find out what I was reading was to see

what dust had been blown off the book, then he'd look at it, then I was doing

the same thing to him; so, we had a good time and became good friends and

remained friends for the rest of his life. Ultimately, Chuck and Seth won that

case, but not without a hard fight by Herman.

Ms. Edmon: I think it's fascinating that you identify the County Law Library as your home

away from home. I don't know if the folks at the County Law Library know

this -- they would be particularly interested in light of your getting this year's

Beacon of Justice award from the County Law Library.

Ms. Hufstedler: It was very important. By the time I had my son, I closed my downtown

office and put in a law library at home, but that wasn't big enough to have all

the federal reports, so I was still spending a lot of time in the County Law

Library where I had access to federal cases.

Ms. Edmon: That's great. So, in your actual law office did you have a law library?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I had a perfectly adequate California library, an electric typewriter

- 66 - Ms. Edmon: A secretary?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, no. I was my own secretary. After all, I could type 60 words a minute,

and I could take shorthand at court reporter speeds, because shortly after I

graduated undergraduate, I spent several months in which I was teaching at a

commercial school. In return for my teaching business letter writing, I was

given my court reporting classes for free; so, I decided to learn court

reporting and at that time. We didn't have stenotype; so, I was taking

shorthand dictation as a court reporter would.

Ms. Edmon: What point was that?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was just after I graduated as an undergraduate.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned that no one would hire women as lawyers at the time. Was

that just an understood thing, or did you actually try to get a job anywhere?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I tried to get a job. Nobody would want me.

Ms. Edmon: What kinds of places did you look?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, the major law firms in downtown Los Angeles, but they just didn't do

that.

Ms. Edmon: So even No. 5 at Stanford ... didn't make any difference to them?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not a bit. They didn't think that women were fit to practice law. The

situation hadn't changed much by two years later, when Sandra Day

graduated. She also was an officer of the Stanford Law Review. Nobody

would give her a job either. She went to Arizona and did other things, and

then she ran for the legislature and won. She'd only been on the bench in

Arizona for a very brief time when she was appointed to the U.S. Supreme

- 67 - Court, because the number of Republican women who had gone to law

school was so minute that the pickings were very slim. Fortunately, she's

very good, but it just goes to show that things hadn't changed two years later.

Ms. Edmon: Did you know her at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: Slightly, and Bill, Bill Rehnquist, of course, was in the same class. Bill had no

trouble getting a job at all. That's just the way it was.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned a baby somewhere along the way. When was your first child

born?

Ms. Hufstedler: My only child was born in 1953, my son Steven Mark, who later became a

medical doctor. He's an anesthesiologist. He was in academic medicine for

some time at University of California in Irvine, and then he had adventures of

his own. He needed to have some more wherewithal; so, he went into private

practice. He still is in private practice.

Ms. Edmon: In 1953, you had only been out oflaw school for three years. Did you think

about waiting to have a child so that you could spend more time in practice?

How did all that work?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, what worked is that we decided we would like to have children, and

that didn't work out for a while, but it did in 1953, so we were very pleased

that we had our son. We would have liked to have had more children, but we

didn't succeed at doing so.

Ms. Edmon: How did balancing being the mother of a young child and continuing your law

practice work after that?

Ms. Hufstedler: With difficulty, of course. I had found a sitter, but I had to be, as far as I was

- 68 - concerned, at home, so ifthere was a burst of silence, I would know

something was wrong and would find out what happened, or if the decibel

level became higher than I thought it ought, I'd check too, but I was at home.

But one of the things that happened was that, in the neighborhood in which I

lived in Pasadena, it was one of the subdivisions that was built after the

Second World War to give assistance primarily to returning veterans. There

were inexpensive home loans, but the result of all that was, even with all that

benevolence, the neighborhoods became stratified by age and by income and

by color of skin and all that so that it wasn't as if the people who lived in

those suburbs didn't care about youngsters who were left in the inner cities,

they just never saw them. They were invisible to them. And, well, when he

started to go to nursery school, I found out how to drive car pools like

everybody else was doing at that time; so, I would do the carpool driving

primarily on the weekends when I could take all the driving and my friends

would drive part of the time too; so, that worked out.

Ms. Edmon: So your office was downtown for the first three years, and then you moved

into your home in Pasadena?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right.

Ms. Edmon: And were you there from 1953 until 1960?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, except that I spent a lot of time in the Attorney General's office, and in

San Francisco, because the Special Master who was hearing all that litigation

was in San Francisco; so, I stayed in a hotel room then, and we had offices

for the Attorney General's staff of Arizona v. California.

- 69 - Ms. Edmon: When did you start that work?

Ms. Hufstedler: I started doing the research in 1963, no, it's earlier than that, in 1953, and

then gradually I worked my way up in that office to become the Special Legal

Consultant to Pat Brown. It was, to put it mildly, extremely complicated

litigation.

Ms. Edmon: You would consider yourself to be in your own private practice up until 1960

when you became a legal consultant, is that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I can't remember the exact date, but it must have been closer to 1958

when I became Special Legal Consultant to Pat.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about that period. What did you do on the case, how did it go?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it was a fascinating case, of course, of great complexity. I learned more

about water rights than I ever thought I wanted to know and how to run

reservoirs and all those things, and, of course, you had to learn all the treaties

and you had to learn all about present perfected rights and all the kinds of

water laws that had developed in the West, which was quite different from

what developed in the East.

What developed in the East in water law, because it had plenty of water

mostly, was to adopt the law of England in which you used the Thames for

shipping and plenty, all that sort of thing, but water was not just a frill or

something for fun, it was a necessity, so that present perfected rights were

measured by how much water was actually put to good use. Then, if you

built the dam or whatever you did that used the water, the date of your

perfected right would go back to the date upon which you had started using

- 70 - the water beneficially.

We didn't have riparian rights as they did in the East and in England, so it was all about learning all of the ins and outs of water law and all of the techniques about how you make things grow on diverted water. Then, of course, one of the big problems is, when there is a lot of irrigation, there's a return flow from where the water is put to where it gradually comes back to the source of the water, and, of course, during that period it gathered a lot of salt; so, one of the big problems for years has been, and still is, there were treaty rights with Mexico in which to deliver water. Well, it turned out that by the time it got to be there it was wet, but it was mighty salty, and, of course, there was a lot of water diverted to the Salton Sea, and one of the reasons that's so salty is because it was all returned to the river after it had become very salty indeed. It still is a very salty lake. Then, of course, there were issues with respect to the water rights for Indian tribes and fish and wildlife and a series of matters of great complexity and interpretations of treaties; moreover, one of the big problems was that there was a compact

created in the mid-20s, called the Colorado River Compact, which split the

assumed waters of the Colorado River so that half of it would be in the Stat es

of the northern part of the river and the other half in the southern part. Well,

they thought there was going to be 15 million acre-feet of water in that river,

it just didn't tum out to be right. It was less than that, so instead of 71/zacre­

feet that was wet, you had to divide up shortages; so, there were lots of

complicated problems on those issues as well, and then, interpretation of the

- 71 - compact and all kinds of issues that came up, essential resources in grave

jeopardy of supply, so that there was lots oflitigation about that.

Ms. Edmon: And this case ultimately went to the Supreme Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was originally in the Supreme Court, because that is the only place such a

case can be filed when you have a state suing a state or a state and the United

States involved. You have to sue in the original jurisdiction of the United

States Supreme Court, because it is the trial court and court oflast resort. But

since the courts can't sit there for endless months hearing all the testimony in

one complicated case, the Court always appoints a special master to take the

evidence, and then the special master writes a report and then briefs to the

Supreme Court are either attempts to support or attack the special master's

report. The first special master died after he'd taken a bunch of testimony, so

we'd had to start over again.

Ms. Edmon: Your role in connection with this acting as special assistant to Pat Brown,

what was it you did?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was one of a team of four people to write all the briefs for the second special

master and for the Supreme Court.

Ms. Edmon: At that point ... what offices were you working out of?

Ms. Hufstedler: Out of the Attorney General's office.

Ms. Edmon: And that was where?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was in San Francisco when the matter was before the special master, and, of

course, it was in Washington during the days of arguments, because the

Supreme Court spent four days listening to nothing but argument in that case

- 72 - exclusively the first time around, and then they heard it again because two of

the justices had died, so it was another round.

Ms. Edmon: Were you commuting back and forth weekends from Pasadena? How did all

that work?

Ms. Hufstedler: That wasn't practical. I had to stay a lot of times in San Francisco when I was

litigating there and in Washington when we were litigating there. A lot of

work was done in libraries in Los Angeles so I could be home during that

period of time.

Ms. Edmon: Was it your connection to Pat Brown that led to your appointment to the

Superior Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, it was unquestionably so, because he knew me well by that time, and he

knew the quality of work I did, and so he, much to my surprise, appointed me

to the LA Superior Court. At that time it wasn't as big a court as it is now.

There were 120 judges, 119 men and me. That's right, I was the only one.

Ms. Edmon: Were you the first woman on the court?

Ms. Hufstedler: I'm not sure, I think there was another woman who'd been appointed before

me.

Ms. Edmon: That's amazing! 120 judges, and how many courthouses were there at that

time?

Ms. Hufstedler: In the whole state I don't know, but in LA County there was one.

Ms. Edmon: Everybody was working out of the same building? And this was downtown?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yeah. Yes. The branch courts weren't developed until later.

Ms. Edmon: There was a Municipal and a Superior Court, but you were appointed to

- 73 - Superior?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right.

Ms. Edmon: That was by then-Gov. Brown? In 1961?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. That's correct. So, I was first assigned to an ordinary civil trial court. I

was only in the trial court for one year all those years I was on the bench. The

second year, I was made the presiding judge of all the pretrial departments.

Ms. Edmon: What did that mean?

Ms. Hufstedler: All the matters with respect to pretrial for all the judges who heard pretrial

matters would come in there as if it were a master calendar court, and the

cases were all assigned from there, and I heard a lot of them too, of course.

Then, in my second year after that I was appointed to the law and motion to

take the overflow from writs and receivers. It was at that time that I created

tentative decisions in every case. Myself, I had no law clerks or anything.

Occasionally, I would have an extern for two or three months, but that was it.

Ms. Edmon: Did anybody have law clerks?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. There was just no extra help.

Ms. Edmon: Were you always assigned to civil?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I did a great deal of other kinds of things too. I did a lot of writs and

receivers as well as law and motion, and I was assigned there for two years.

Then, because I found out that by the tentative decision method-which I

called ''Notes" at the time because the only department of the Superior Court

in which anyone had any information early on was the probate department, and

probate commissioners created ''Notes", which could be read by the lawyers to

- 74 - find out what was missing and what they needed to do; so, I called them

notes-and the lawyers couldn't see them until the morning of oral argument,

because I was writing it at night.

Ms. Edmon: Were you literally writing them, giving them handwritten notes?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. That's right. I wrote them all and, of course, some of them could be

fairly brief, like what do you do about George v. Florida, or something like

that, because a recent case may have come out of the Appellate Courts that

changed the way the argument was going to go; so, I found out very soon that

when the lawyers got the hang of that, the person who was on the winning side

would simply submit on the notes, and I only had one argument to hear, with

the result that I would clean up the calendar very rapidly. That left me easy

pickings for all the rest of the judges, so they would ask me to be a substitute

judge for presiding over the family courts or whatever was a bit over rushed at

the time, and that's what I did.

Ms. Edmon: It was your impression that these tentative rulings were new?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, nobody else had done it before; so, I decided that it would certainly

shorten the calendar and gave a lot of focus to what the arguments were going

to be, and, of course, it did. I didn't write big opinions except, of course,

when I granted summary judgment, then I wrote a full opinion.

Ms. Edmon: How did your colleagues treat you?

- 75 - Ms. Hufstedler: To begin with they were pretty unsure of what kind of critter this was going to

be, and within a fairly short time, I got acquainted with all the judges, and, one

of the things that helped was, the judges had a judges' lounge in which a very

modest luncheon was served, and that way I got acquainted with a lot of

judges who were very helpful. One of the things that used to drive me mad in

that court at that time was when I was presiding at the family law court, was

there was no place to put the small children who were being brought to court.

Now, I hear that's been changed, but I used to be looking down in my purse to

give some money off to the bailiff so that they could take these good

youngsters out of the courtroom and go buy them an ice cream cone and keep

them busy for a little while.

Ms. Edmon: So, there was a period that you were in family law?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, as a substitute for the then-presiding judge, simply because I finished my

calendar in the morning, and normally I was supposed to have lots of time. Of

course, by the time I took care of somebody else's calendar as well as my own,

it meant I did a lot of work late at night.

Ms. Edmon: Was there one presiding judge of the court, like there is now?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, there was.

Ms. Edmon: Was the system of assignments like it is now, that is, that it would be the

presiding judge that would decide where you would be assigned?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's exactly right. Of course, by the time I was in the third year on the

court, I was also on the BAJI committee and then on the executive committee

for the full court, so I had something to say about what should be done about

- 76 - necessary things in the court.

Ms. Edmon: That was how long after being appointed?

Ms. Hufstedler: Second year.

Ms. Edmon: I know BAJI, but some of these folks listening to the tape might not know

what BAJI is ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Book of Approved Jury Instructions. CALJIC is the approved jury

instructions in criminal cases and BAJI is the approved instructions in civil

cases.

Ms. Edmon: It was a very important part of what the court did for a long time.

Ms. Hufstedler: It certainly was, and it still is important. I don't think it has quite the clout that

it did in those earlier days.

Ms. Edmon: Can you describe some of your earliest experiences as a judge?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, the first was to reassure the lawyers that they hadn't gotten before some

kind of a strange critter that was imported from Siberia, but it all worked out.

They soon found out that I could work with them and that was that and it

went well. But when I was judge of all the pretrial courts, I had calendars

every day for settlement conferences, so I spent a lot of time settling cases.

Ms. Edmon: How did becoming a judge affect your income?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was a step down in income, but not enormous, because I was not paid a

great deal for the kind of work I did, including the work for the Attorney

General of California. It was not exactly rolling in the high numbers, although

there was something amusing about it when I was then living in the home we

owned in Eagle Rock, and to my great surprise the local newspaper came out

- 77 - with a bold headline "EAGLE ROCK WOMAN EARNS A $20,000 A YEAR

JOB."

Ms. Edmon: And that was when you were with the AG's office?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, when I was appointed to Superior Court.

Ms. Edmon: So that was the pay for a judge when you started?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, but, of course, that was luxurious compared to the work I did when I was

younger, because I was paid a glorious $5 an hour to write major briefs.

Ms. Edmon: Was that the pay pretty much all the time when you were working as a sole

practitioner?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Of course, my overhead was very small. That's one of the big problems

that's happened in the legal profession, of course. All the equipment you

needed, if you had access to a law library, was either some dictating

equipment, and a secretary who could type or take shorthand, and maybe you

had an ancient dictating machine, but that was about it, a standard typewriter,

but we didn't have any of this digital equipment and all that-it didn't exist.

Ms. Edmon: Times have changed.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and, of course, I also had ... when you were going to make copies of

anything, you did it by carbon paper and a standard typewriter, or if you had to

make a lot of copies of something, you had a substance called Thermo fax.

Well, Thermo fax made perfectly respectable copies, but it had one advantage

and disadvantage: the paper disappeared within five years. A problem, yes,

but at least you didn't have to worry about having yourself plunged into

discovery in all these disintegrated documents.

- 78 - Ms. Edmon: Thermo fax, is that what was on the roller?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, that was mimeograph. Thermo fax was kind of a gelatin-like thing in

which you put documents on top of it, and it would make a copy.

Ms. Edmon: What about when you were a sole practitioner, do you know what the starting

salary for an associate was in a large law firm?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, Seth received the top dollar in our class, because he was the first in our

class-he got $275 a month. But, of course, we did have some advantages

over the present people who graduate from law school now, because we didn't

owe anything. There were no student loans. You could rent a nice apartment

for $100 a month so that living expenses were much more modest than they

are today.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about the appointment process to become a judge back in 1961. How

did that work?

Ms. Hufstedler: The governor simply made up his own mind who he wanted to appoint and

who he wanted to persuade to take the bench even if the individual was a very

prominent lawyer. It'd be a substantial cut in income, but he believed there

was a duty to the administration of justice, and he was a very persuasive man,

so most of the judges whom he appointed were chosen by him personally. He

didn't have a big staff to scope them all out. For the most part, he knew

where they were, but one thing about Earl Warren, I think, everybody who

knew him recognizes that Earl Warren always did the job extremely well that

he was given, and that was true whether he was attorney general of California,

or whether he was governor of California, or whether he was on the U.S.

- 79 - Supreme Court.

Ms. Edmon: And you knew Earl Warren?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: How did you come to know him?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I can't even remember how we were first introduced. I think I was early

on the bench when I got to know him. Of course, Chuck Beardsley knew him

very well, and Seth did know him, so ... and we saw each other at various

meetings we'd both attended. We were not bosom buddies, but we knew each

other.

Ms. Edmon: In terms of the actual appointment process, then, there wasn't a formal written

application you filled out?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: And our JNE commission, the judicial nomination evaluation committee ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: That hadn't been created either.

Ms. Edmon: It was just the governor's appointment, and it happened?

Ms. Hufstedler: It happened, that's right. Now, it wasn't a very formal process then, but of

course the bench wasn't nearly as big as it is now. It'd be almost impossible

for any governor to know personally every person that was going to be

appointed to the bench.

Ms. Edmon: Did the system work then as it does now, where you have to be elected after

appointment?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. After appointment, you have to run.

Ms. Edmon: Did it also work as it does now, that ifno one was challenging you after the

- 80 - first election, if nobody challenged you for your seat, your name would not be

on the ballot?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right, that much has not changed. Almost everything else has, but that

hasn't.

Ms. Edmon: You were on the Superior Court from 1961 to 1966, is that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right.

Ms. Edmon: During that period, can you describe what your positions were on the court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I mentioned I was a trial judge in a trial department for only one year,

and thereafter, only in specialized courts, and then that became Judge of the

Appellate Department of the Superior Court by appointment of then-Chief

Justice Roger Traynor.

Ms. Edmon: Then you spent, after the one year in the Appellate Department, that's when

you went to the Court of Appeal?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And that appointment was also by Governor Brown?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: During that period that you were on the Superior Court, are there any cases

that stand out in your mind, that were interesting, that you handled?

Ms. Hufstedler: I'm sure there were, but it's been too long ago for me to remember

the details of those. It's been too many years ago.

Ms. Edmon: Were there any particular people who had a lot of influence on your life during

that period?

- 81 - Ms. Hufstedler: My husband always, of course, but I had many friends at the bar and at the

bench, and some of them made contributions to me in one way or another. I

should have backtracked for some time, that the person who was the most

important mentor in my life when I was young was a man by the name of Ernie

Pyle, who was ... I think I've mentioned him before.

Ms. Edmon: Yes.

Ms. Hufstedler: But I never found another mentor who was quite that meaningful in my life

thereafter.

Ms. Edmon: Did you have continuing contact with Ernie Pyle during this period?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, no, he'd been killed. He was killed in Iwo Jima.

Ms. Edmon: That was about what year?

Ms. Hufstedler: 1944.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about the Court of Appeal. That was 1966 to 1968?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. But there were some amusing, I think, incidents that happened when I

was on the Appellate Department of the Superior Court. At that time,

pornography cases went to that court, and these two gentlemen, John Aiso and

Gene Breitenbach, both of them were devoutly religious men, and they

couldn't abide sitting with me on the bench looking at pornographic films, so

they had their sitting, and I would sit there by myself At first, some of the law

clerks thought that would be exciting, because we did have law clerks for that

department, but they soon found out that they were staggeringly boring, and I

thought it was perfectly silly, my sitting there by myself in a robe while

watching pornographic films. But one thing I had a hard time with my

- 82 - colleagues about was, they seemed to believe it made a difference if the human

beings being pictured were handsome or beautiful, but I didn't. If they were

beautiful enough, it could be art, but otherwise it was pornography. I didn't

share that view.

Ms. Edmon: During that period, the entire five years, did you ever have another woman

come on the bench?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not so far as I can recall. There were women on the Municipal Court, but not

on the Superior Court.

Ms. Edmon: Did you feel any hostility from the other judges, any discrimination, anything

else?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. I didn't feel anything except that they just thought that it was like having

a strange pup put in with their litter, you know. It took them a while to realize

that I was a lawyer and a judge just as they were, and it didn't make that much

difference.

Ms. Edmon: Any other interesting stories that you can recall from that period on the

Superior Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there was always something. I tried to persuade some ofmy then­

colleagues that it was inappropriate to call female lawyers who showed up in

court as "honey" or things of that kind.

Ms. Edmon: That was a hard sell?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, they just weren't used to it. It took them a while to decide that that was

not a professional way to behave. I thought it was a little necessary to do

some teaching while I was there. It was just an entirely different world.

- 83 - Ms. Edmon: At that point, were there at least women appearing fairly regularly before you?

Ms. Hufstedler: Very rarely. There were quite a few women who spent time in the family law

courts and in the probate courts, but since I was not assigned to them, except

for the time I was substituting for Roger Phaffwho was presiding judge for the

family law court, I didn't see many women.

Ms. Edmon: The Court of Appeal -- that was the Second Appellate District at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, it was.

Ms. Edmon: And were there different divisions, as there are now?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. When I was appointed to that court, that was brand new division, that

was the Fifth Division, that was the latest new one, and my old friend and

former colleague from the Superior Court, Otto Kaus was there, and Clark

Stevens was the third justice. There were three justices in each of the

divisions. Later on, John Aiso was assigned to that division. Otto and I were

good friends before we ended up sitting together, and Otto and I talked law all

the time, and we sometimes had quite heated debates about it, but whether I

persuaded him or he persuaded me, we never dissented from each other. The

one thing used to be somewhat unnerving about Otto was, all of a sudden, he

would forget I didn't speak any German, and he would suddenly speak a bunch

of German, and I had tell him he had to stop because I wasn't understanding

what he was saying, but we were close friends.

Ms. Edmon: How had you gotten to know Otto before that?

Ms. Hufstedler: On the Superior Court.

Ms. Edmon: Otto was on the Superior Court with you?

- 84 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And who made it to the Court of Appeal first?

Ms. Hufstedler: We made it at the same time.

Ms. Edmon: So with the creation of this new division ...

Ms. Hufstedler: With the creation of this new division, he was named presiding judge, and I

was an associate justice.

Ms. Edmon: Can you recall any particularly interesting cases that came to you during that

period?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I can't. I know there were, but it's just hard to reconstruct it after all

these years. I'd have to go back and look at some of them. I think that one of

them turned out to be quite interesting, because this is a trade secret case in

which I wrote a very careful opinion which spelled out for the first time

nationally what the elements of the cause of action were for recovering in a

trade secret case. It was called Diodes, Inc. v. Franzen [(1968) 260

Cal.App.2d 244, 67 Cal.Rptr. 19]. It's still cited, and it's in all the kinds of

textbooks on that subject matter. It laid out all the principles, and it was very

useful for Federal courts too, of course, because lawyers didn't know what

they really had to prove -- Whether they had to plead it or not, they had to

prove the elements of the trade secret, protectable trade secret; so, it became a

very well known case.

Ms. Edmon: There were only three justices in the division?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Was that the case with the other divisions as well?

- 85 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, for all of them.

Ms. Edmon: All three of you sat on every case that came to you?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's correct, quite right. We each had one law clerk apiece, and I had some

women law clerks, one of them is now, she's in ... I think she's recently been

elevated to the California Court of Appeal.

Ms. Edmon: Do you remember who that is?

Ms. Hufstedler: I could tell you when I think about it for a few moments. Frances Rothschild -

now, a Court of Appeal Justice.

Ms. Edmon: This was the first time that you had a law clerk working for you?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right. A paid law clerk. I had an occasional volunteer when I was in

the trial court.

Ms. Edmon: The externs that you mentioned.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: In 1968, you moved on.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And how did that happen?

Ms. Hufstedler: I had been recommended to the President by several people, and I don't know

who all the recommenders were, but in any event, I was appointed by

President Johnson, and that was greeted with about as much enthusiasm at the

court as ifl had been nominated as the Typhoid Mary for Dairy Queen.

The then-presiding judge was Dick Chambers, of the Ninth Circuit. Of

course, there wasn't any other woman in the United States on any Federal

Appellate court. I was the highest ranked female jurist in the United States

- 86 - for years until another female was finally appointed. But I remember vividly

my experience when I first met Dick Chambers, as true in all courts, as you

well know, the first thing you do as a new judge is go wait upon the presiding

judge and introduce yourself, well, when I went to his chambers in San

Francisco, he wasn't there, so it was necessary for him then when he came

back to wait upon me in my chambers. They were very modest compared to

his, needless to say, but I've never seen a man more nervous. He had no idea

what kind of a freak he was going to have to deal with. He was so nervous

during the time he was interviewing me and sitting in that chambers, I had to

fight down the tendency to go over there and put my arm around his

shoulders and say, "There, there, Dick, I'm not going to do the court over in

chintz." His announcement to the Ninth Circuit Conference ofmy

appointment had been that he was going to have to build a bathroom for

females.

Ms. Edmon: In the California Court of Appeal, were there any other women in your

division of the Second District?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I was the only one on that one, but, of course, Mildred Lillie was on the

court. She was appointed some years before I was.

Ms. Edmon: Was Mildred the only other woman on the Court of Appeal at that time?

Ms. Hufstedler: The only other woman in southern California.

Ms. Edmon: While you were on the Court of Appeal, was there a presiding justice over the

entire Second District?

Ms. Hufstedler: Otto Kaus. He did preside over the whole court.

- 87 - Ms. Edmon: Then to the Ninth Circuit. What about the appointment process? How did

that go?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I was called back to Washington, of course, to testify, which I did. I

didn't have too much trouble about that. There was no doubt an eyebrow or

two that had gone up slightly, escalator ride up to see some sort of female

there, but it was not a particularly rough process. I know there was some

degree of skepticism about what in the world a female was going to do in that

different sort of zoo, but it was relatively mild. It wasn't until I totally shook

up the Ninth Circuit that things changed at all. But then after a few years,

Dick Chambers and I became very good friends and remained so for the rest

of his life on the bench and mine on that court. It takes time. It helped, of

course, because two of the other judges of that court had been judges of the

California Court of Appeal in different areas than me, so I wasn't going in

there with completely strange people. That was a help, and we became cozy.

Walter Ely was on that court, and I had known him, of course, as a trial judge

when I was in the Superior Court. We knew each other well.

Ms. Edmon: You were both on the LA Superior Court at the same time?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, he was not. He was a well known lawyer. He was practicing all the

time.

Ms. Edmon: You started in the Ninth Circuit in 1968?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right.

Ms. Edmon: Where were your chambers?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, my principal chambers were in Los Angeles in the U.S. Courthouse. I

- 88 - also had other chambers in San Francisco, and that was true of everybody else

in the Circuit, unless some of them happened to live in San Francisco.

Ms. Edmon: At that point, was the Ninth Circuit made up as it is·now? Have there been

any changes?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, they've got the same geographical territory. There've been lots of

assaults upon that, but the number of judges has increased very substantially.

There are now 28 active judgeships, but there are also 22 senior judges. We

don't have any inert judges on that court, it's just that when you reach the

age of 70 in the Federal Court System, you can't retire, but you can step

down as an active judge. You can continue to sit with the court as much as

you want to, but you don't have to take a full load; so, you have a less heavy

caseload.

Ms. Edmon: Other than your experience with Dick Chambers, what was your relationship

with the other judges on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, like many other courts, you have to get acquainted with the people and

they with you, but that happened fairly rapidly, because I was sitting with

them. So we knew each other in our judicial capacity, and, of course, I had

known a couple of the judges who were there before in our previous Court of

Appeal lives. We all got along fine.

Ms. Edmon: What stands out as some of your most significant cases during that period?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, there were legions of them. I wouldn't attempt to recall them all to you,

but I had a lot of significant cases, because triviality is not going at a gallop in

the Federal Appellate courts. There were a lot of significant cases.

- 89 - Ms. Edmon: Anything that you can identify as your favorite?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not without thinking about it for quite a while, but I'll think about it. By the

time I get a transcript of this, I'll probably be able to name some.

Ms. Edmon: Who were your closest colleagues on the bench during that time period?

Ms. Hufstedler: I couldn't say that anybody in particular stands out head and shoulders above

everybody else, but I had been friends with Ben Dunway before I went on the

bench, and we continued to be very good friends after he went on the bench

and Stanley Barnes, who had been presiding judge in the LA Superior Court,

had gone to the Ninth Circuit, and he was very well known on the Ninth

Circuit, and, of course, I knew him and Walter Ely very well because those

two also had chambers in Los Angeles, and Stan Barnes and I used to from

time to time play bridge with a couple of our law clerks for lunch, but, of

course, Stan was a lot more conservative than I was, but that didn't mean we

didn't get along. We got along just fine.

Ms. Edmon: You commented about shaking up the Ninth Circuit, how did you do that?

Ms. Hufstedler: By simply being there as a female. I just had different ideas about quite a few

things than they did, and so it took a little while for us to get all adjusted to

the different attitudes, but it all worked out eventually.

Ms. Edmon: You were on the Ninth Circuit from 1968 to 1980. Do I have that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, until 1979.

Ms. Edmon: During that period, surely there were some other women who came on the

court.

Ms. Hufstedler: Not on the Ninth Circuit.

- 90 - Ms. Edmon: Is that right? None on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not then. Dorothy Nelson came on just shortly after I departed. In fact, she

inherited my chambers in Los Angeles.

Ms. Edmon: She got the one women's restroom?

Ms. Hufstedler: She got my combination of stove and refrigerator for making coffee in the

morning, having a Coke in the afternoon.

Ms. Edmon: As a Ninth Circuit judge, what sort of support help did you have in terms of

law clerks?

Ms. Hufstedler: Two law clerks.

Ms. Edmon: Do you have a particular philosophy about how you selected your law clerks?

Ms. Hufstedler: Just looking for the very best, because there was going to be a great many

opportunities for those who were chosen, and besides that, I wanted the best

help I could get. The caseload was very heavy, of course, it still is, in fact it's

even worse now, because immigration appeals have increased by 600%, and

therefore, it's a very heavy caseload.

Ms. Edmon: And was that the case then as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, but immigration cases were a very slight portion of the load, because the

immigration judges, appellate and trial, were not only good, but there were an

adequate number to do a good job. Now, the attorney general under

President Bush decided he would "streamline" the immigration courts, so he

got rid of half the judges, and he gave orders that you didn't have to write

opinions anymore as an appellate immigration judge, so you've had no record

to speak of, so needless to say the appeals went up like a straight line curve.

- 91 - It's created serious problems, particularly for the Ninth and Second Circuits.

They have a huge load.

Ms. Edmon: In terms of selecting law clerks, you didn't insist that they come from

Stanford or any other particular law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I just wanted to find the best I could, and I was helped by my former law

clerks and other situations to encourage people who were very, very good to

apply for clerkships.

Ms. Edmon: Were there women on the District Court during those years?

Ms. Hufstedler: A few.

Ms. Edmon: So then in 1979, tell me what happened?

Ms. Hufstedler: My husband and I had made many trips walking up the Himalayas in Nepal.

We had just come back from one of those holidays. We were about three

days back in my chambers looking at all the work that had piled up, and I got

a call from one of my former law clerks who said, "You're likely to get a call

from Vice President Mondale." I said, "For heaven's sakes why?" "Because

you're being considered for appointment as Secretary of Education." That

was really weird. Not very long after that, two hours, here comes Walter

Mondale, asking ifl could come back to Washington, what this was about,

that I was on the short list for consideration for appointment to President

Carter's cabinet. So, I thought that that would be interesting to go do, I

didn't take it too seriously, but traveling was no mystery to me, so he wanted

me there the next afternoon, which I couldn't do, so I said I'd be there on a

Thursday-I went there on a Thursday-and had a whole line of people to

- 92 - tell me all about all sorts of things, and I realized by the time I'd been there two days, that there wasn't a short list: I was the list. And so, this was a shocker, and I called my husband. By that time I had come down with a full­ blown lawyer's cold, and I'm mumbling away, saying please come back here,

we've got to make some major decisions but fast.

So, he flew to Washington, and, of course, it was a pretty heavy decision to

make to walk out on my lifetime job as a Federal Appellate judg~ to tum into

a cabinet officer, but we talked it over and, after all, when the President of the

United States asks you to do something for the country that's honest and

needed, you have to be pretty pusillanimous if you're going to say no. I had

never met the President in my life, of course, because, as you know very well,

sitting judges cannot have anything to do with politics. I had had nothing to

do with politics at all for many, many years.

First time I ever met President Carter was when he called me into the oval

office, and here's a delicious scen~it was nice and warm all day, so outside

the oval office there's a nice little area where you can sit around a little round

table, so President Carter and I were sitting there, and had a cup of tea, and a

little squirrel kept running back and forth across our feet under the table while

he talked about his experiences being on a school board in Georgia. So, he

was comfortable and I was too.

What he wanted to do was to announce my appointment that day. My court

didn't even know anything about it and, needless to say, I said ''No, we just

couldn't do that, please, Mr. President, I have to talk to my court first

- 93 - because a lot of people are going to have to do a lot more work. We have to give them some warning." So, he agreed to do that. Then, of course, I went to the Senate hearings on confirmation, and there were some strange questions asked then, needless to say.

More than one Senator asked me about what I was going to do, how soon I was going to resign to go on the United States Supreme Court. As I pointed out to them, I knew the members of the Supreme Court, and I didn't know

anybody who was planning to resign or was seriously ill, so I was finally

confirmed. Then, I found out what I'd really got myself into, and talk about a

murderous job; that was a murderous job.

I worked 18-20 hours a day, seven days a week. I got home one weekend,

for Easter weekend, because to try to put together a cabinet-level department

is a tremendous amount of work. Besides that, there had been over 157

educational programs put into that department that came from multiple

departments and other agencies. But there was also a hiring freeze, so that I

had to wait upon all these agency and department heads to see if I could

negotiate for any vacancies, because, of course, I had to build a civil rights

office and an inspector general's office and all the rest of the various offices.

I had to have human beings who could be there to do it.

It also happened, but I was so naive I didn't know about it at the time I had

been appointed, that it was a time which was called in Washington the

"passback of the budget." That is the time in which the Office of

Management and Budget gives all the numbers for all the programs to all the

- 94 - agencies and departments, and if you don't like what they've done, then you

have to go through appeals through the entire 0MB. I was fortunately able

to find a really superb woman, who was a Washington insider, who knew a

great deal about the budget process. Her name was Cora Bebe. So, Cora

and I took off a three-day weekend, and I sat there with three big briefing

books that described what every single one of these programs did, and

everything that had to be done, and who on the Hill was going to veto what

or who had upped some money ifl needed it even ifl didn't ask for it, so that

we sat there, and we made out the whole campaign at that time.

Then, I went directly back to Washington and took the appeals myself

through 0MB, and then the appeals from there go to the President and Vice

President, which I also did. Then, you had to go testify before Congress all

the time about each one of these programs, because programs were not all of

the same committees, so you had multiple committees to testify before; so, I

was testifying constantly on the Hill. Of course, there was the problem of

how to interview the people for the Presidential appointments, and, needless

to say, if you have a head of the Department of Education of the United

States, you have to be sure that the people who are at the very top level

positions look like a profile of the people of the United States. So, every time

you make one appointment, you looked at the next appointment to be sure if

the last appointment was white, it has to be a different complexion.

Fortunately ...

Ms. Edmon: This was dictated by your own internal desires for what your Department

- 95 - should look like?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Because you can't have a Department of Education which does not

resemble the people that it is educating, and because it's a multicolored bunch

of people with skins of different backgrounds, it's very important to be able

to show the concerns for that, which I did. Fortunately, I was able to recruit

some absolutely outstanding people for all those jobs.

Ms. Edmon: So, you created the entire staff of that Department?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. And then, of course, you have to build an Office of Civil Rights and all

the rest of these things, so it's just a staggering amount of work.

Ms. Edmon: How did you come to President Carter's attention? I take it it was a surprise

to you to get that call.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, people who had known me, including some ofmy former law clerks,

had been in Washington, and they knew people, and I was well known by that

time in the legal profession, so that several of those people talked to the

President about me, and so that's how I ended up there.

Ms. Edmon: Did you know Mondale before?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I never knew any of them before.

Ms. Edmon: What about your background in education?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I'd spent a good deal of time teaching when I was a youngster, but I

had no particular outstanding qualifications. I had served on committees in

California for various kinds of programs with respect to education, and I

knew some of the chief people in the education world, but I had never been a

school principal or anything like that, but they apparently decided it was

- 96 - going to be enough, and, of course, that Department was immediately caught

up in some of the big controversies of the time, such as the constitutionality

of the one-house veto, and things like that, because this was the baby

Department, they decided to put me on the panel for that, so I was testifying

on all those constitutional issues too.

Ms. Edmon: Did you ever at any point in time consider going into politics?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it was not my dish of orange pekoe, I was not interested in going into

politics. I had had enough of politicking when I was in Washington to save

me for the rest ofmy life.

Ms. Edmon: When you got out oflaw school, did you ever think about doing anything

other than actually practicing law?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: When you were going through the confirmation process for the Department

of Education, did you have any other great challenge other than, as you

mentioned, the issue of, are you just doing this to get on the Supreme Court?

Was that the sense that you got from their questions?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, the question was whether I was going to be there at all for very long, and

that was nothing I had in mind, that is, there didn't seem to me any likelihood

that anybody was going to drop dead or resign or retire from Supreme Court

at that time.

Ms. Edmon: At some prior point, you mentioned the fact you knew people on the

Supreme Court.

Ms. Hufstedler: I knew them all.

- 97 - Ms. Edmon: How did you get to know them? From the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, part of the time from the Ninth Circuit, but part of the time because we

ended up on different kinds of panels in different sorts of places, and I knew

people who knew them, and then we got acquainted that way, but I knew

most of them.

Ms. Edmon: For what period were you with the Department of Education?

Ms. Hufstedler: A year and almost two-thirds, from '79 until the president walked out of the

office at the end ofhis term.

Ms. Edmon: What happened to the Department after that point?

Ms. Hufstedler: I think it went very well, but, you know, it's had its ups and downs like any

Department does, because the budgetary problems were always difficult, but I

think it's gone well.

Unfortunately, during the last administration, which we still have at the

moment, it's very, very difficult to get the necessary monies and the necessary

help to reach down to what needs to be done. I think "No Child Left Behind"

is a lovely slogan, but it doesn't have reality to it, and there's lots ofreasons

for it, but, of course, one of the main ones is that some of the best things

we've done have also had some bad consequences, that is to say, as long as

females were only supposed to be fit for nursing and teaching, who had a.

college education, very bright women went into nursing and teaching. But

when the opportunities began to open up for having other opportunities for

educated women, they began to do things like get, oh, MDs, and get law

degrees, and lots of other things.

- 98 - You may not recall that in 1940, fewer than 23% people of the United States had been through high school, and, of course, that in part was because the economy of the country could not absorb a very large number of highly educated people so that a ticket for upward mobility for youngsters was a high school diploma. Needless to say, because that was true, high school teachers had a lot of prestige---they didn't get paid very well, but they had a lot of prestige in the community-but when the GI bill was such a success, and student loans were available to all kinds, millions of youngsters in the

United States, then the college diploma became the upward mobility credential, and now, of course, it really takes another degree to be in the sweepstakes, but the result has been diminishing the number of people who really wanted to go into teaching, because it's one thing to say it's a wonderful job to be a wonderful teacher, but if you're somebody who's working for something other than God and a habit, it's a pretty thin life; so, it's very difficult to recruit and retain teachers, and it's also true that the various kinds of systems for unionization of teachers has meant that there's more concern about longevity than concern about first rate quality. So, these

are all the things that happened, and the result has been very difficult.

Of course, we have a lot of youngsters whose first language is not English,

who have other kinds ofleaming issues and disabilities that have not been

paid attention to at the time they should have been. Head Start was a great

success; however, it only reached a fraction of the children it needed to reach

at any time, and that's still true. So, a lot of youngsters just never got on the

- 99 - boat, and all that combination of circumstances has meant that it's very

difficult to get the right combination of help for youngsters who need it.

Ms. Edmon: All these were issues during your tenure?

Ms. Hufstedler: Sure.

Ms. Edmon: Were there other women in Carter's cabinet?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, the Secretary of, it used to be Health and Human Services, just a second,

I've just had a lapse on her name, I knew her extremely well, the name will

come back to me ....

Ms. Edmon: And how was your time there? Did you enjoy it?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there were occasions that were very pleasant, but I was working so

hard all the time that I can't say it was just a ball. It was a killer job.

Ms. Edmon: Your son must have been just about 23 at that point? What was he doing?

Ms. Hufstedler: He had finished medical school, and he was an academic, teaching in medical

schoo 1 at UC Irvine, but he had in the meantime married, and then he had a

couple youngsters, and academic income was not quite enough to take care

of all the needs, so he went into private practice.

Ms. Edmon: Moving to Washington, D.C. at least was a bit easier, because he was out of

the house?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about the period-we skipped a long period of time when you were in

various positions on the LA Superior Court, the Court of Appeal, the Ninth

Circuit, while juggling being a mother ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I wasn't the mother of a young child by then. He had substantially

- 100 - grown up, so that, of course, as any mother knows with an adolescent boy,

it's like having a vacuum cleaner with teeth in order to get by a refrigerator,

and also when he was a teenager, I figured the best way to be sure that things

were going all right is to have him bring his friends home and see if I could­

in the summer time, they could swim. If you have lots of food and have

water for them to play in, they can usually do all right, and they were also all

interested in music and lots of them had musical instruments. My son, like

many other youngsters, played the guitar, and the decibel level was a little

higher on the old folks, but as long as we would go in the other room and

shut the door, and then, we'd just walk out occasionally to be sure everybody

was behaving themselves, symptoms I know you recognize for yourself, that

it all seemed to work out.

Ms. Edmon: During all these years, was Seth at the same firm?

Ms. Hufstedler: He was with Beardsley, and that firm gradually became a very substantial-size

firm until he just decided a little more than ten years ago, that youth was not

in our tea leaves at all, so we wanted to be sure that all the people in the firm

had good and secure jobs to go to, give them other opportunities than we

could give, which was when we decided to merge with Morrison & Foerster.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned Otto Kaus when you two were on the Court of Appeal

together. At some point, Otto went into the Beardsley firm as well, right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Yes, he did. We had a good time together.

Ms. Edmon: Back to the Department of Education, your period as Secretary of

Education-what interesting stories can you think of from that era?

- I 01 - Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, there are lots of them, but there were so many things going on_at the

same time. Opening the department at the White House was interesting.

Arrangements had to be made sometimes, because wherever we were going

to have some kind of celebration or meeting, we had to be sure that the

situation was relatively secure, and there was going to be no problems about

mixture ofraces and all that sort of thing, so we had to arrange substitute

places in case one didn't work out, so that always took some chores, but

there were some occasions when it was very pleasant. Fortunately, the

persons whom I succeeded in having the President name to the Presidential

positions all got along with each other very, very well, and they were

extremely constructive, and became good friends. That was fine.

Ms. Edmon: Your office was in the White House?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, no, it was first in the old Executive Office Building for a while, and then

we negotiated around to get some space for the Department where NASA

also was, and so, it took quite a little doing to do that.

Ms. Edmon: At the end of that year and two-thirds, how many people were in the

Department?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was a very large Department by that time. I would say at least 150. It

takes lots of people to run all those programs.

Ms. Edmon: What was the most enjoyable part of the job as far as you were concerned?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it was to see some of the programs begin to thrive that had been waning

somewhat, and to be able to get Congress to go along with me on some of

the things that needed to be done. It was never easy, but it worked fairly

- 102 - well.

Ms. Edmon: And what was your relationship with Carter during this period?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we became good friends at that time. Of course, there were a lot of

things that had to be done that the President needed to be involved with,

whether it was Presidential appointments or some of the issues that

Departments were facing, which, of course, the nation was facing, which

meant that he was facing too; so, we had lots of conversations.

Ms. Edmon: Did I hear you say that during that ent~e year and two-thirds you only made

it back to Los Angeles once?

Ms. Hufstedler: Exactly, once for one weekend.

Ms. Edmon: Amazing.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, that's the way it was.

END OF SESSION

- 103 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

FOURTH INTERVIEW

February 3, 2007

This is the fourth interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on

February 3, 2007.

Ms. Edmon: OK, it is February 3, 2007, and we are once again in the lovely home of

Shirley Hufstedler. As a complete aside, I was this morning watching a DVD

that my mother-in-law gave us about early days in Los Angeles-not so early,

but its focus was on the Pacific Electric Red Cars.

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I remember them well.

Ms. Edmon: It was fascinating to watch. I had to stop before the end, so I haven't really

gotten to the end to figure out what happened to them, but I wondered if you

had ridden them?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, I did, and it was the easiest way to get from where I lived in an

apartment with a good friend of mine during the time I worked at Paramount,

and also, a very good way to get to downtown Los Angeles. You just took

the Red Car, and there you just sat until you were in downtown Los Angeles.

Ms. Edmon: It was incredible to me how many miles it covered in Los Angeles.

- 104 - Ms. Hufstedler: A tremendous amount. You could also get from almost any place in the

valley to the seacoast.

Ms. Edmon: My husband grew up in Long Beach, so this is how he and his mother would

come to downtown; she in her gloves and hat, and they would shop at

Robinson's, and that's their memory of LA.

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, well, he remembers that well then. Well, that's how it was, and, of

course, in the old days it was also a place to go to the cafeteria at Clifton's.

During the Great Depression, Clifton's served a great deal of meals for free to

people who were hard up, and it was a great place for kids to go-I loved it,

because they had a little chute in which you pushed the button and out came

sherbet, which was great, and they had a lot of singers who were having a

hard time getting work, and a lot of singers, operatic types, sang for the

entertainment of the guests.

Ms. Edmon: At Clifton's?

Ms. Hufstedler: At Clifton's. It was a long time ago.

Ms. Edmon: I didn't come to Los Angeles until the 80s, but Clifton's was still there.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yeah, the big Clifton's that I knew well when I was a child had long since

disappeared.

Ms. Edmon: Oh, is that right? That was different?

Ms. Hufstedler: It looked like you were coming into a bunch of redwood trees.

Ms. Edmon: Huh! But it was in downtown?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: In a different location than the Clifton's that was later there?

- 105 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Interesting. I'm not sure I know where you lived over the period, unless

while you were working for the studio you lived on the Westside?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I lived in Studio City with a good friend of mine.

Ms. Edmon: And after you and Seth were married, after law school, then where did you

live?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we first lived in downtown Los Angeles within walking distance of

where we worked, and then later we bought a home in Pasadena where we

stayed for many years until we sold that house and moved to Eagle Rock, and

then the highway engineers wanted to put a freeway through part of that area,

so the property was condemned, and we therefore took the money and

bought the house we have now.

Ms. Edmon: And this is in La Canada? And how long have you been here?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Well, it's almost 45 years.

Ms. Edmon: I think we ended up with your years in the Department of Education. Going

back just for a second to the Ninth Circuit, what did you find most satisfying

about your work there?

Ms. Hufstedler: We had a lot of extremely challenging and interesting problems. I had some

very entertaining colleagues, not all of whom agreed with me all the time-­

we'll put it the other way-I didn't agree with them all the time, but it was a

good court, and, of course, it wasn't anything like as big as it is now. The

geography hasn't changed, but the number of personnel has changed

significantly. There are now 28 active judgeships, still two vacancies, but

- 106 - there are more than 20 senior circuit judges, who, as you know, can take kind

of retirement at the age of 70, but still continue to sit with the court. They've

been invaluable help to the Ninth Circuit, with its being overwhelmed with

cases. Particularly, since there has been a 600% increase in the number of

immigration appeals, all of that due to the fact that President Bush's then­

attorney general decided he would "streamline" the immigration process by

removing half of the immigration appellate judges and then announcing that

they didn't have to write opinions anymore, they could just decide the case.

So, these cases come before the Ninth Circuit in huge numbers. Of course,

the Second Circuit is also drowning in them, the Fifth has a great many, but

the overwhelming numbers are in the Ninth Circuit.

Ms. Edmon: So, you didn't have that sort of percentage of immigration cases while you

were on the court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, no, we had about 6%. But so far, the administration has refused to

restore the quality of the work that could be done by the immigration judges.

Ms. Edmon: Did they still have the senior judge system when you were there?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, but there weren't as many senior judges at that time. We very

frequently had district judges sit, of course, district judges were never

assigned to sit on a panel in which cases from the district in which they

ordinarily sat would come before the court.

Ms. Edmon: Did you not have as many senior judges because they ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Because the court was just smaller then.

- 107 - Ms. Edmon: Back to the Department of Education. Did you think that gender played any

role in your getting the job?

Ms. Hufstedler: I've never had the slightest suspicion that it did-I don't think so. I think it

was because I had a great deal of experience, not only on the bench, but other

kinds of public service, including doing a number of things involving the State

of California when I was still on the bench. And, of course, one of the big

hairy topics of the time was busing. The people in the far West and the North

always believed that apartheid was simply a blight of the South. They never

had any idea that they had the same problems in the North, and it isn't

because the schools were segregated like they were, but they might as well

have been, because people of color did not have the financial wherewithal to

buy residences or rent residences in the areas outside of the inner cities with

the result that many of those youngsters were crammed into schools that were

virtually all white or all black, and when trying to restore the balance, which

had grown out of Brown v. Board of Education, the only answer that

anybody could come up with was busing, and then a lot of people were in an

uproar about busing. I remember when I was first appointed to the

Department of Education, I was asked on Good Morning, America, what did

I think about busing. You know, answer in one second! I think about it a

great deal! What else can you say? They didn't want a discussion for an

hour and a half on the subject.

Ms. Edmon: So, you had been involved in busing litigation in California?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I was when I was on the bench on a number of them, because they were

- I 08 - just starting to weave their way through the various Appellate courts, and

there was a real shock by people in the suburbs, because it isn't that they

disliked the youngsters who were left in the inner cities, they just never

thought about them at all, because they were completely invisible.

Ms. Edmon: And so, were there other reasons-you said you were involved in issues

related to the State of California-issues other than busing?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, other than busing, a lot of different kinds of things, such as what

ought to be taught or not taught with respect to religion and all these things

in the public schools; so, the governor appointed a commission, and I served

on one of those commissions to see what could be done with respect to the

law of California, and what was the practical thing to do about it.

Ms. Edmon: The governor for that appointment was ...

Ms. Hufstedler: I believe that was Ronald Reagan then.

Ms. Edmon: What was the Department expected to accomplish? What was the role of the

Department of Education?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was supposed to make everything wonderful without everybody having to

go through any big pain and strain, which of course was silly. But, of course,

there was also a Civil Rights Department in the Department of Education, and

that always raised a lot ofhackles, because those individuals had to work hard

on the issues involving integration, and also the economic imbalance that had

happened. Especially hard hit was California, because when the voters voted

for Proposition 13, they usually didn't have the vaguest idea that they made

enormous transfers of money to Sacramento and Washington, D.C., because

- 109 - property taxes are deductions, and when those deductions were reduced

significantly, then all of that money went instead to Washington and

Sacramento.

Ms. Edmon: So not having the constraints of Good Morning, America, what were your

thoughts about busing?

Ms. Hufstedler: I thought about it a great deal, of course, because there were many complex

issues involved with busing: who should be bused, how far, what kind of

school could accommodate the additional youngsters, and what were the

various school systems and the individual schools doing about meeting the

needs of youngsters whose first language was not English, for example.

There were lots of issues with respect to that.

Ms. Edmon: Did the Department of Education get involved in that in some way?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, the Civil Rights Division was heavily involved in it all the time.

Ms. Edmon: Did they issue rules or mandates or guidelines or anything ...

Ms. Hufstedler: All of the above, and, of course, there was also a problem about when federal

funding should be taken away from school districts that were not obeying the

mandates of the Supreme Court of the United States and the laws of the

United States.

Ms. Edmon: Must have been a fascinating time.

Ms. Hufstedler: It was fascinating as long as you could endure it. I worked 18-20 hours a day

seven days a week at that job. I got home exactly once for one weekend.

Ms. Edmon: How did you deal with your family during that period?

Ms. Hufstedler: I asked them to just bear up, because there was very little I could do. My

- 110 - husband was still practicing law as head of his law firm in Los Angeles, and

my grandchildren were all in California, so I just didn't get a chance to see

them.

Ms. Edmon: When did the grandchildren come along?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, my first two were born to my son's first wife, are now 21 and 19, so

you can just figure the time.

Ms. Edmon: About 1986?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's about right.

Ms. Edmon: So, that was the first one, I guess, and so your grandchildren came after you

left D.C., do you think?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I was in D.C. a good deal of the time, but they would have been born

before I went to Washington.

Ms. Edmon: Were there women in the Department of Education?

Ms. Hufstedler: Certainly. One thing that was very plain to me that you couldn't give a lesson

to the United States about was what was necessary with respect to education

unless you had people who were, both the presidential appointments and

others who were working on all these issues, who had faces that resembled

the faces of what the American population looks like, so that every time I

chose a person, for example, to be recommended to the President for a

Presidential nomination at the department, I looked at all the colors of

everybody else's faces and decided who had to be next. For example, for

elementary and secondary education, I thought it was vitally important that a

person of color be in that job, because you couldn't really explain to the

- 111 - country that the department really cared about all those youngsters if the

person who was head of the department looked like ... a white dentist.

Ms. Edmon: Did you have total discretion in terms of the hiring?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, to be sure a number of positions in the department were subject to the

approval of the President, but for the vast majority of the jobs, the answer

was yes.

Ms. Edmon: Did you actually interview everybody, or were there people there who could

interview for you?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, with respect to all the Presidential appointments, I interviewed many

people in order to select one to suggest to the President. Others, for

example, those who were named as the heads of the various major divisions

of the department had discretion on their own to hire people, and they did.

Ms. Edmon: How many Presidential appointments do you think you had to make during

that period?

Ms. Hufstedler: As I recall, there were seven.

Ms. Edmon: Through all of this, we have not talked about dress. Were pants appropriate

in the workplace?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, they were not appropriate at any time I was on the bench. We had

given up wearing hats and gloves every day, but one wore skirts and a coat

for most things, and in the summer time we wore dresses.

Ms. Edmon: That carried through to D.C., was that still the case when you were in D.C.?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Did it vary who the person was, say any women who were in the Department,

- 112 - the same would apply?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they had to follow what was the expected routine in terms of dress code.

Ms. Edmon: We talked about role models before. In Washington, did you develop any

particular role models there?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, there weren't very much of anybody, so that wasn't practical. You made

up your job as you went along learning.

Ms. Edmon: How about you mentoring others?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I tried to do so lots of times, I'm not sure always successfully, but there

were a number of people I helped a lot, I thought, because many of them

were new to Washington, and they had to learn what the ropes were like

there, about to whom they had to curtsy and to whom to bow, and under

what circumstances, so, of course, I had to help.

Ms. Edmon: Have you kept in contact with people that you knew during that

Ms. Hufstedler: Quite a few, not always, but quite a few. A man who was the number two

person on the scene I had selected from Cleveland. He had been head of one

of the major agencies in Cleveland, and I have kept track ofhim all these

years, and several of the others I have also tried to keep track 0£

Ms. Edmon: I printed out a copy of the list of the other Secretaries in the Carter

administration, and I had forgotten that Joe Califano, who was one of my old

partners at Dewey Ballantine, was in the cabinet.

Ms. Hufstedler: Is that right? Well, I knew Joe, of course, I knew him before I went to

Washington.

Ms. Edmon: From what context?

- 113 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we both were participants in several different kinds of organizations at

the same time, and I saw Joe in a lot of these different locations under

different auspices.

Ms. Edmon: Was Joe gone? It lists him here as the Secretary of Health, Education and

Welfare from 1977-1979. Was he gone from the administration by the time

you got there?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Although we still kept in touch with each other, and here again I have

another laps~the woman who succeeded him ...

Ms. Edmon: It looks like it was Patricia Harris.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, it was Pat Harris.

Ms. Edmon: Was she the only-when I looked down the list there weren't many women.

Was she the only other woman Secretary?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, Juanita Kreps was there. She's it. That was the big list at the time.

Ms. Edmon: Because you were so tied up in the business of the Department, did you have

much time to spend with the rest of these folks? Did you develop

relationships with the other cabinet members?

Ms. Hufstedler: There were some I developed relationships with, not all of them, but it was

necessary, as I mentioned earlier, that I had to negotiate for vacancies in

order to be able to staff the Department, and I prevailed upon all of them. Of

course, I spent a good deal of time with Pat Harris, because she had the

biggest book of personnel who were going to be transferred to the

Department of Education, so we had conversations, and, of course, we all

saw each other at cabinet meetings.

- 114 - Ms. Edmon: Were there frequent cabinet meetings?

Ms. Hufstedler: They were quite regular, yes.

Ms. Edmon: Were the other events of the day, foreign affairs, things like that, affecting

your job in the Department?

Ms. Hufstedler: Everything that affects the White House affects what goes on in the

Departments. I've probably had less a sense of impact by those events in

putting the Department together, I was so busy doing everything else that I

didn't have much time to worry about it.

Ms. Edmon: Did you actually have any discussions with Carter about the foreign affairs

issues that were going on at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not at the time.

Ms. Edmon: But since then?

Ms. Hufstedler: Occasionally.

Ms. Edmon: What did you find most satisfying or rewarding about your position in the

administration?

Ms. Hufstedler: Finding first rate people to do a first rate job on some very, very difficult

issues, and the fact that they were extremely good at it was very rewarding to

me.

Ms. Edmon: How do you think government work affected you?

Ms. Hufstedler: I think it made me realize how much more complicated the workings of

government are than I'd ever known before, because, unless one has had to

grapple with all the issues on how you put a budget together and how you get

matters through Congress, you don't have the vaguest idea about how much

- 115 - work there really is to go into all of that.

Ms. Edmon: I assume you left, because Carter left.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's exactly right.

Ms. Edmon: How were things at that time? Was there-do you think people expected

that Reagan was going to win the election?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I think everybody was wondering who was going to win. In that sense,

the situation then was not vastly different from what it is today, except there

seemed to be more conspicuous nominees for the Democratic Presidential

seat than there are now.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned Reagan before. Did you know Reagan before ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I knew him quite well, not only because I served on some commissions

that he appointed me to, but because I had known him for many, many years,

going back to the days when he president of the Screen Actors Guild.

Ms. Edmon: When you were working in Hollywood?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned the commission relating to the busing issues? Were there

other commissions you served on?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not that I can recall at the moment. I'm sure there were some, because there

were always so many different kinds of things I had to belong to and be

concerned with that the numbers now escape me. It's been too long ago.

Ms. Edmon: When there was a turnover with the administration, then you returned to Los

Angeles?

Ms. Hufstedler: A President's cabinet always walks out when the President does.

- 116 - Ms. Edmon: Tell me what you did then.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I came back to my home, getting acquainted with my own family, and

then, I tried to figure out the things that I wanted to do. I thought I wanted

to return to law practice, but I had another opportunity. For example, I was

invited to take an endowed chair at Stanford Law School, which I did for a

quarter, in which I was teaching and also conducting seminars on all of the

major issues of the day, which I thought the youngsters would like to know

about, and I was also chairing a faculty at New York University, which was

put together to train newly appointed State Supreme Court justices and

Federal Appellate judges on such issues of such importance as habeas corpus,

and all the kinds of things that one had to learn about if you were first an

Appellate judge.

Ms. Edmon: Stanford-you were the Phleger Professor of Law, is that right? And who

was Phleger?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was it. That's right. Herman Phleger was a man who had endowed that

chair. He was a well-known lawyer at that time.

Ms. Edmon: Were you the first to hold that chair?

Ms. Hufstedler: As far as I know, yes.

Ms. Edmon: You said for a quarter?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, for a quarter.

Ms. Edmon: Was that the first full-time job you took after leaving Washington?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I also did a number of other teaching jobs all over the United States and

lecturing.

- 117 - Ms. Edmon: For that quarter that you were at Stanford, you taught a class on major issues

of the day?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and I taught a seminar in which I was trying to get youngsters to figure

out how it was going to be practicable, if at all, to use school buses as the

way to take parents to work and children to school, which would provide

some money to support the operation.

Ms. Edmon: That was part of the law school as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Were those the only two courses that you taught during that quarter?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: I'm ready to take those classes! They sound so interesting!

Ms. Hufstedler: They were interesting.

Ms. Edmon: Did they continue to teach that sort of a course?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not as far as I'm aware. When I disappeared, so did that course.

Ms. Edmon: What a shame! It sounds fascinating.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it stretches young people's minds a lot to decide what you can do, and

what's practical, and what isn't.

Ms. Edmon: I suppose it's-you were in such a unique position, just coming from

Washington, to be able to teach it. They probably don't have the opportunity

to have that ...

Ms. Hufstedler: It wouldn't be very frequent, but it would be possible to accomplish.

Ms. Edmon: A quarter at Stanford, and then what next?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I began practicing law with-because I became a partner in what was

- 118 - then Beardsley, Hufstedler, and Kimball. Doing appellate work, of course.

Ms. Edmon: What was the name of the firm before you joined it?

Ms. Hufstedler: Same title, Beardsley, Hufstedler, and Kimball.

Ms. Edmon: "Beardsley'' was Chuck Beardsley? I don't know Kimball ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Kimball was a woman who practiced in the same suite where Chuck and Seth

were initially practicing. She was a probate specialist, and Chuck thought it

was vitally important that a person who was female be a partner, because it

was a lesson to be learned by the whole profession, and Helen was a very nice

woman. She didn't do much by way of trial work except in probate.

Ms. Edmon: At the time you joined the firm at that point, how many people were in the

firm?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was still a relatively small firm; as I remember, there were twelve ofus.

Ms. Edmon: Office in downtown LA?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: During the period, you were practicing law at this point, you were always

taking teaching opportunities and lecturing opportunities around the country?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: What kinds of things were you talking about?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was talking about all kinds of issues of the day, things such as education, of

course, but also topics of other sorts of interest, you know, did we overdo

habeas corpus, what other potentials are there to cure some of the symptoms

of distress within the judicial system. I taught a lot of different kinds of things

at different places. I lectured at Harvard and some of the major well-known

- 119 - institutions, but I thought it was important that a former Secretary of

Education should let some of the lesser known institutions have a go at a

dame who used to be in the cabinet.

Ms. Edmon: Did you ever think about going back to the bench?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. England lets people do that, but in the United States, we don't. When

you're gone, you may be "gone but not forgotten", but you're never

reappoint ed.

Ms. Edmon: Oh, I think in the state system, at least ..

Ms. Hufstedler: That can happen.

Ms. Edmon: But you never were tempted?

Ms. Hufstedler: Never in the least. I had already gone down that path.

Ms. Edmon: What kind oflaw did you practice during this period?

Ms. Hufstedler: Appellate work. All different kinds of cases, yes.

Ms. Edmon: Ninth Circuit, or both State and Federal?

Ms. Hufstedler: State and Federal. Not only the Ninth Circuit, but in other Federal courts

across the country.

Ms. Edmon: What a perfect person for it.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I'm not sure about that, at least there was plenty of opportunity. I still

do that.

Ms. Edmon: That's still your primary focus?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about the transition of the firm's names and what happened to the

firm over time.

- 120 - Ms. Hufstedler: Eventually, Helen retired, so she came out of the name, and then when Otto

Kaus retired from the California Supreme Court, he became a partner in the

Hufstedler firm.

Ms. Edmon: So it was Beardsley Hufstedler and Kaus?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, we made a lot of name changes, and then for a while merged with

another law firm, with the Carlson firm, and that lasted for several years, but

the Carlson firm's interest and areas of practice were not identical to our

own, so they gradually went most of their way and we went our way.

Ms. Edmon: So, it was Beardsley, Hufstedler & Carlson, as I recall, during that period,

right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, it was.

Ms. Edmon: And then, what happened next?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it happened that my husband and I looked into the tea leaves, and we

couldn't see a single sign of immorality, so we decided twelve years ago that

we ought to be sure that everybody in the firm would have an opportunity to

be with a very good firm, many of the principals of which were similar to the

Hufstedler firm, and so we merged with the Morrison & Foerster firm.

Ms. Edmon: It's remarkable to me that that could be twelve years ago.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it happens in a hurry, doesn't it?

Ms. Edmon: It sure does. I certainly remember that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, well, you know I'm reminded of that old, old poem about "I just

stopped in for two short beers, and there went 37 years."

Ms. Edmon: Exactly!

- 121 - Ms. Hufstedler: It went by in a hurry, at least retrospectively it does.

Ms. Edmon: How many people were there in the Morrison & Foerster firm when you

joined it?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I can't tell you exactly. The principal office of the firm was still in San

Francisco, but it wasn't long thereafter that the firm decided that it ought to

become national and then multinational; so, now there are over a thousand

lawyers all over the world in our firm.

Ms. Edmon: And what about the Hufstedler firm, how big was it?

Ms. Hufstedler: I'll have to search my faded memory, but I think there were thirty ofus, and,

of course, one of the breakthroughs in the old Hufstedler firm was that Seth

and Chuck decided that it was essential that we break the color line in

downtown law firms, and so after a significant search effort, the firm hired

Sam Williams. Sam was, of course, a terrific lawyer, and he then became

later president of the LA bar and then of the state bar, and he was well on the

way to being president of the ABA, except he was stricken, and that ended

that opportunity for him.

Ms. Edmon: He was the first African-American president ofboth organizations, right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and he was the first African-American hired in a downtown law firm in

California.

- 122 - Ms. Edmon: How old was he when he passed away? As I recall he was very young-it

was shocking.

Ms. Hufstedler: He was really young, I think he must have been about 39 or 40, but he, like

many African-Americans, he was stricken with diabetes, and it got worse, not

better, when he got older. A great shock.

Ms. Edmon: He was a great person of our profession.

Ms. Hufstedler: He was indeed.

Ms. Edmon: Did you ever forego a career opportunity or leave a position for the sake of

the career of your husband?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I think I always managed to merge both except for the time I was in

Washington, and that merge just didn't quite work. When he was practicing

in a law firm he headed in California, and I was stuck in Washington.

Ms. Edmon: Do you recall ever receiving any unusual career advice, or what you would

consider sexist career advice?

Ms. Hufstedler: When I first got out oflaw school, the answer is yes. No law firm would hire

a female lawyer in any important law firm in California. Unless it was a

father-daughter arrangement, it just wasn't done. Indeed, what Stanford Law

School recommended for me was that I be a probate secretary in a probate

firm in Santa Barbara.

Ms. Edmon: What happened to change that? Once you started blazing trails ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it wasn't so much my doing. What really happened is that the civil

rights movement began to take effect with real momentum, and many of the

women who were undergraduates in college who had that experience realized

- 123 - suddenly that it wasn't only men of color who were discriminated against, it

was also females of every color, and that one changed a lot of women's minds

about what they wanted to do with their lives so that they first began to sign

up in significant numbers and then the faucet became a flood. As you know,

today more than half of the students in law schools are female.

Ms. Edmon: At any point along the way, did you ever feel that you experienced incidents

of gender bias or discrimination or harassment?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I've never experienced any harassment, but I didn't so much experience

discrimination as working, with various kinds of difficulty, even with clients,

to decide if they could really trust a female. I remember I was working on a

case in a trial court that involved a 1,400 ton forging press, and all of these

hefty males didn't think that a dame like me could possibly know anything

about a forging press. Well, I didn't know anything about forging presses to

begin with, but I certainly learned a great deal about them while I was there,

and it turned out to be a very comfortable relationship eventually; it just took

time.

Ms. Edmon: I guess that's sort of a theme I've seen throughout this: that you've got the

patience to bring them around.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it just takes some patience and a little experience helps too.

Ms. Edmon: When you were on the courts, did you ever experience any discrimination?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not among my colleagues. To be sure, some of the presiding judges in the

first instance had no idea what they were going to do with a female judge, but

after all, I didn't have to learn how to pick up my skirts when I went up on

1'

- 124 - the bench. They did.

Ms. Edmon: Do you feel you did anything special to fit in to a male-dominated ...

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I just did my job. And I think doing my job and doing it capably was

adequate to be able to help everybody else make a judgment that they didn't

have a fox in the hen house.

Ms. Edmon: Do you feel over the years in any of these different jobs that your style was

different from that of a male colleague?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I think that we approach things in a different way initially, and then, one

way or another, they chivvied me around or I chivvied them around till we

saw the same way. Of course, that wasn't always true. I think sometimes,

because the men just didn't see the scene the way I did, there seemed to be a

kind of a gap in their understanding that men and women have biologically

assigned different roles, and there wasn't a single man, no matter what he

thought about it, who was ever going to get pregnant, or have to worry about

nursing or taking care of small infants. They just didn't do it, and they had no

idea what was entailed. All that had been done for them, particularly older

men who came from a scene which was the most prevalent, that is, momma

stayed home and papa went out to work. She did all the work, and he didn't

think about even wiping a dish unless momma told him he had to. They did

recognize that dishes got dirty, but they didn't think that they needed to do

anything about it.

Ms. Edmon: It's interesting-you talk about this male attitude or mindset during the

time-Seth certainly seems to have been understanding during all these years.

- 125 - Were there ever any difficulties?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not really, because his mother had worked all of his life and his two sisters

had always worked all the time, even though they had families and did

everything else. He grew up having that expectation, so it didn't bother him a

bit. Now, it's true that he never has learned to cook particularly. He knows

how to boil water all by himself, but ... and when I had a broken leg, he had

to-under my supervision-he had to figure out how he could cook a turkey,

but that really wasn't his scene.

Ms. Edmon: When was the broken leg?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, he was president of the California bar at the time, and we went to an

evening affair at-what was the hotel that's turned into a more residential

hotel right next to, very close to, the park in downtown Los Angeles, not

Pershing Square, but MacArthur Park-the Town House. Anyway, that's

where it was, and when we came out, a couple oflights in the parking area

were out, and at that time we had a convertible with a large door, and my

husband, being forever the gentleman, opened the door for me, and as I

stepped back I hit the concrete berm and did the twist which is so common

for serious ski injuries, and I heard my leg break; so, that had to be dealt with.

Ms. Edmon: This was-he had to learn to cook during the period he was the president of

the state bar?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, well, under my supervision, of course.

- 126 - Ms. Edmon: Now, he was the president of the Los Angeles County bar as well as being

president of the state bar?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, he was later president of the senior lawyers with the ABA, president of

the American Bar Foundation for years too.

Ms. Edmon: Is that right? I didn't know that.

Ms. Hufstedler: He's always been head of everything he ever enters. One of his many talents

is he's a cryptanalyst, so he spent the Second World War in naval intelligence

breaking Japanese codes; so, that's what he did all during the war in

Washington and Hawaii.

Ms. Edmon: That's fascinating. What years was he in the service?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, he went into the service when he was in his second year as an

undergraduate because he went into the naval program at USC, and one of

his professors at that time knew that he was already into cryptanalysis, and so

when the rest of the young men who were graduating as ensigns were sent off

to different kinds of schools for whatever training they were going to have, he

was immediately snapped up as a "cryppy."

Ms. Edmon: So that's what he did during the Second World War?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And this was all before law school obviously, he came out of the service and

then came to law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, like most of my classmates did, almost everybody was on terminal leave

at the time I entered law school.

- 127 - Ms. Edmon: In that job, did he avoid actually being involved in the frontlines?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, people who were engaged in cryptanalysis were not people that anybody

wanted to have hurt or captured, so they were taken good care of

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned Helen Kimball, I was going to ask if there were women in the

law firm at the point you came back?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, not at the time I came back. Helen, yes, but there were others who came

along later, particularly Pat Phillips. Pat was a specialist in family law, she

still is, of course, and now she left the Morrison & Foerster firm to build her

own firm, which makes her very happy and the people who are with her

happy too.

Ms. Edmon: And her family?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and her family. But she has more of an encyclopedic knowledge about

all the lawyers in California than I ever had in my life, she's phenomenal.

Ms. Edmon: And she was the first woman president of the LA County Bar?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, she was.

Ms. Edmon: I had forgotten that she was with your firm, of course, that was before

Morrison & Foerster?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and she was one of the founding members of the City Club.

Ms. Edmon: That's right. I am sure over the years that you mentored many women

through your firm. I know of Laurie Zelon ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, of course, Laurie was one of them, and there were others, many of

whom have gone on to do very well indeed.

Ms. Edmon: Many of whom have been interested in the bench?

- 128 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, certainly several of them have been. Now, Helen Bendix is on the

bench, never was a member of our firm, she was a member of other people's

law firms, both on the East Coast and California, and she's done very well.

Ms. Edmon: You mentored her as well? How did you get to know Helen?

Ms. Hufstedler: She was my law clerk at the Ninth Circuit.

Ms. Edmon: I didn't know that. She's on the LA Superior Court.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, she is indeed. Does a very good job too.

Ms. Edmon: She certainly does. She's the head of the court's alternative dispute

resolution, which makes a huge difference obviously for our court.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, she does a very good job ofit. Yes, it does.

Ms. Edmon: Would you generally describe your relationship with other women in your

firm as good?

Ms. Hufstedler: Very good. Very happy relationship.

Ms. Edmon: Did you take an active role in advocating the hiring of women in particular?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I was always on the lookout for first rate lawyers for hiring at the firm,

and a number of those persons turned out to be female, for which I was

delighted; so, I was a one-woman gang for all those people.

Ms. Edmon: Fast forward, when you returned to Los Angeles to practice, was appropriate

attire for the office still dresses?

Ms. Hufstedler: It still was, but it was beginning to loosen up. It was permissible for women

to wear pantsuits as long as they were very dignified pantsuits, and now it's

become even more informal, because casual Friday has turned out to be

casual everyday, which shocks New York lawyers, I think.

- 129 - Ms. Edmon: Since you came back to Los Angeles and are working at the finn, did your

gender play a role in the types of case that you got?

Ms. Hufstedler: As far as I can tell, no. It had nothing to do with it. The question was, how

difficult was the matter, for what kind of client, and our rates, of course, were

much less than they are today, but even so, they were not cheap, and by the

time I came back to practice, the amount of overhead for downtown law

finns had gone up in a straight-line curve. Because, after all, when I started

practicing, law office space in downtown Los Angeles was $8 a foot, and the

equipment you had to have was a standard typewriter, a telephone, and

maybe a Thermo fax and lots of carbon paper; that's all you needed. Now,

for serving middle-income clients, it's just not possible, because a middle­

income person simply cannot afford to pay the rate for just the overhead of

the office in which a lawyer is sitting in downtown Los Angeles. I have been

very concerned about this situation for a long time, because when the legal

profession seems to be unable to find a way to help with the legal problems of

the majority of people in the United States, I think the law's in trouble. I've

been very anxious for a long time to see some of the major law finns get

together and form a foundation whereby they would give the money to the

foundation that they were paying to young associates, and the young

associates could, if they wished to, spend six months earning less money in a

foundation office, but they would get a lot of hands-on experience, which the

young lawyers in big office just can't get except in some pro bono matters.

They'd learn a great deal that way.

- 130 - Ms. Edmon: We left off on the other side of the tape talking about your work in pro bono,

so can you tell me what kind of pro bono work you've done over the years?

Ms. Hufstedler: Really, there's quite a lot of it. Sometimes, not surprisingly, educational

issues, sometimes it's in other areas where I think that the pro bono is really

essential, because so many not-for-profit organizations have major legal

issues. They simply cannot afford to pay standard legal rates, and therefore,

it's necessary to give them some help. There's just a lot of different varieties

of things that I have done over the years for pro bono.

Ms. Edmon: I have a sense that they have trial counsel, but I'm not sure that they've got

appellate departments in the pro bono organizations.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I think that's true, they don't, so a great deal of time firms that do a lot

of pro bono work, like Morrison & Foerster, undertake those tasks.

Ms. Edmon: Have you worked with a lot of the local organizations such as Legal Aid and

Public Counsel and the like?

Ms. Hufstedler: Quite a bit. But there are also others that come to us for different reasons

trying to have pro bono work done, for example, to help poor school districts

be able to find means in which to continue what is necessary to be done is one

of them; that goes on indefinitely. I'm now trying to help out something the

firm is doing with respect to a 12-year old boy who was wrongfully accused

of misconduct of a serious nature, and he was never given any-even no

semblance of a due process hearing, and he was expelled from school, and, of

course, all of this stuff is on his record. It's really disadvantaged him all along

the line; so, that's a case in which I think justice is long overdue, and it is

- 131 - necessary to help schools understand that there are things that they are

obliged to do as a matter of law even though the principal doesn't feel like it

that day. It's an object lesson to lots of schools, and the school board has not

been particularly susceptible to understanding what basic due process

requirements are. But it's things like that, that one is on appeal, and I'm

helping out on that one.

Ms. Edmon: You've continued to keep active in the education area?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes. Not on every case, of course, because some of them don't have

anything to do with education, but, yes, we are very active in education

issues.

Ms. Edmon: Do you have opinions about LAUSD and Mayor Villaraigosa?

Ms. Hufstedler: I have opinions, but they're not very well developed yet. It is just that the

mayor has good instincts, no doubt, but I don't think he has any idea how

complex the school systems are in Los Angeles, or how many things they

have to deal with. Whether you're dealing with a combination of teachers

unions that have their own set of precepts and a school board, which is not

always up to speed on what needs to be done, and everybody else who seems

to have a chip they want to throw in to the controversies, it's a very complex

system. I do think that the immediate past superintendent did a splendid job

of trying to improve the physical condition of so many schools in the Los

Angeles school district. His efforts were not well appreciated, but he did a

great job on that.

Ms. Edmon: That's Roy Romer?

- 132 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Of course, he had a lot of political savvy, because he'd been governor

of Colorado, so he knew all the alarms that go on and all that. I'm hopeful

that the new superintendent will be able to do so, but I must say that changing

from being an admiral to being a school superintendent is a big change. Too

many people have speaking parts and nobody says "aye, aye, sir."

Ms. Edmon: Have you kept in contact with the Department of Education since you left

and with what they're doing?

Ms. Hufstedler: I keep abreast, but not on a daily basis. I know generally what's going on,

but I'm not au courant with what's happening at the moment, and I don't

know the people anymore.

Ms. Edmon: Have the administrations since Carter provided a lot ofresources to keep the

Department going?

Ms. Hufstedler: They've provided a lot ofresources, but it's not enough. That's what you

find out about education all along: whatever it is you're doing, it isn't

enough. Somehow the assumption is that, because education is supposed to

be free, at least until you get to college, that it is free. Well, it isn't.

Ms. Edmon: Throughout your entire career have you been called upon to travel on

business?

Ms. Hufstedler: A great deal, and, of course, when I was chair of the United States

Commission on Immigration Reform, I had to be in hearings all over the

United States, and I had to be in Europe and in Africa, but many of the other

jobs I've had have caused a lot of travel too. I was on a board for West

Point, for example, and once I had to do a good deal of traveling with respect

- 133 - to getting back and forth to those meetings, and they had a lot of meetings,

and then I was a director of MacArthur Foundation for more than 20 years.

I'm not now, so I don't have to go to Chicago every month, which can be

tiresome, especially in the winter.

Ms. Edmon: Where can I find a list of all of these boards that you have served on, and

commissions?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't know that I have a comprehensive list. I'll write it out for you, so you

can find them all.

Ms. Edmon: That would be great. You mentioned immigration reform. When did you

work on that? Was it a commission?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. It was a commission created by Congress, and I was named chair of the

United States Commission on Immigration Reform. It had been created

before I was named, there was a prior chair. She died before I was

appointed, and so that took a lot of doing.

Ms. Edmon: About what time period was that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Let's see, I have to go back and think about it for a minute.... That was

roughly-I was appointed about five years ago.

Ms. Edmon: How long did that appointment last? Were you on the commission for a year

or two?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it was longer than that, about four years. I have stacks of reports

that, not only I, but persons who worked on that commission produced. But

as is so often true with a sticky problem, if Congress can't figure out what to

do about it, they appoint a commission to go study it, and after it's studied in

- 134 - detail, then they put it all carefully on a shelf and decide to go back and create

another commission to look at what happened to the prior commission. It's a

good way for Congress to avoid coming down to cases on what needs to be

done. That's still a situation if the Congress is all tied up about this at the

present time. It's been suggested to members of Congress more than once

that they would be well-advised if they went back and looked at all those

reports that we filed, because we did hold hearings all over the United States,

and, of course, it took me to Geneva and to Kenya and to refugee camps in

Africa, and the situation is very sad indeed.

Ms. Edmon: What sort of recommendations did your commission make?

Ms. Hufstedler: We had quite a lot of them. I think it would be more helpful ifl just sent you

a copy of the final report, which combines all of it. Among other things, it

was how to change the organization of the types of bodies that deal with

immigration, because they're all at sixes and sevens, and it isn't put together

in a way that makes a lot of organizational sense; so, it was to rewrite the

legislation to have things that are supposed to be dealt with by five

organizations to be dealt with more properly by one. But there are lots of

recommendations, I'll send a copy of it to you.

Ms. Edmon: That would be great, thank you. You've worked very hard for lots of years.

Over the years, have you taken vacations as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, we are always devoted to our vacations. My husband and I've been

very interested in climbing up and down mountains for many decades. We

did a lot of climbing when we were youngsters in the Sierras. We had a cabin

- 135 - in the Sierras-we still own a cabin, but we don't get there very much-and

then we got interested in climbing Himalayas, and so whenever-when I was

still on the bench-I could have thirty days off a year, and that way we would

be able to go to Nepal and go climbing mountains. At my ancient age, I don't

go to 20,000 feet anymore, but we will take a holiday commencing next April

to be in Tibet. I'd like to see the Himalayas from the Tibetan side. Of

course, Tibet was closed for so many years, we couldn't go there at all. It's

changed, and, of course, what's happened to the Tibetans is all by itself a

fairly sad story.

Ms. Edmon: You are still climbing?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, but not like I was.

Ms. Edmon: When your son was young, did you take family vacations with him?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and he got to-we started taking him up in the Sierras, going up and

down mountains when he still fit into a backpack. He's been up and down

mountains all his life. He's still interested in doing that.

Ms. Edmon: Are there a couple of spots that stand out as being your most favorite

vacations?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, of course, Cambodia and Thailand are wonderful places to have a

vacation. There are lots of places that are wonderful and my husband and I

have been very interested in African wildlife, and we've gone on superb

vacations in Tanzania and many places in Africa, all of which I recommend,

and we've been very interested in doing some things the MacArthur

Foundation was supporting in the environment all over the world, which

- 136 - means time in Peru, and this magnificent Pantanal, which is in Brazil, which is

the largest wetlands in the world; so, all of these things have been of great

interest to me.

Ms. Edmon: The last time I was here I saw some photos of your last trip to Africa. Where

was that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Tanzania and some of the great wild animal camps in Africa. Some of the

biggest camps in the world are in that country.

Ms. Edmon: Did you feel at times that you had to work harder than your male colleagues?

Ms. Hufstedler: Sure. I don't think that's any mystery, because any time when a woman is

taking care of a family, particularly with young children, and simultaneously

working, that woman is working hard, and that's true whether she's working

at lower wage income, such as cleaning other people's houses, or whether

she's working as a professional, whether a doctor or a lawyer or a professor

or whatever. It just takes an awful lot of work.

Ms. Edmon: Have you noticed that some women are leaving the profession at a fairly

young age these days, and if so, to what do you attribute that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I have noticed it, but the trouble is with these law firms that are now

paying very, very high wages to young associates, they want production for

their bucks in a big way. When these women have family responsibilities,

they simply cannot begin to work the billable hours that are expected of

associates in a law firm today, and so many of them decide that that's enough,

and they either leave the firm altogether or they become of counsel or become

contract lawyers. I have been deeply concerned that these women who are so

- 137 - talented should have a road that's all laid out on how they can get back on

partnership track again if they want to. So far, that's been more "play it as it

goes" rather than having anything that's specific about it. I'm still working

on that, but so far I haven't got any great success to report, but I'm not at all

afraid of pursuing the issue.

Ms. Edmon: What kind of things do you think a firm can do to try to accommodate

women who do have to go off-track for a bit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, the partners can decide if the quality of work, if the woman is still

working within the firm, even as a contract lawyer -- they can assess the value

of her work at that period of time, and she shouldn't expect to be right back

in the class she was in when she went off-track, but she needs to find a way to

get back on the escalator if she wants to. I think it's a great loss to the firm if

the woman does not have that opportunity, and not have it catch as catch can,

but have a regularly marked path, and I'm still working on that, but so far I

haven't won the battle yet, but I haven't given up the fight.

Ms. Edmon: And you're working within the firm?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. There seems to be some great mystery about the fact that the women

have the babies and take care of the young ones, not the men, and nobody's

going to figure out a way to change that! That's not something that a

principal of somebody's law firm can do.

- 138 - Ms. Edmon: Do you feel in a law firm these days that women are compensated comparable

to men?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Until such time as they are taken off-track, but of course the track is so

demanding of tremendous numbers of hours that it's difficult to figure out

how you can put them back and where without very considerable examination

of what the situation is. I just think that problem has to be resolved. I don't

say it's easy, I just say it has to be done.

Ms. Edmon: In terms of numbers, do you think that women still are underrepresented?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they are, because so many of them had had to take a detour on their way

to the top because, after all, the welfare of their children comes first. I don't

think any sensible person would say it shouldn't, of course it should.

Ms. Edmon: Did your firm ever have any special initiatives targeting women?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't think so. Rather, they urged to find talented people including both

women and men, but I haven't seen any program which is specifically

targeted to females. At least, they aren't immediately pointed out.

Ms. Edmon: Did you consider your career in planning the timing of the birth of your son?

Ms. Hufstedler: My husband and I both wanted to have children, so it was just a question of

whether God and my body would be willing to cooperate. I didn't want to

get pregnant the first year I was married, of course, but I was very happy

when I became pregnant in our third year of marriage. That was not a

mistake, that was what we wanted.

Ms. Edmon: Was there ever a time that you took off during the practice oflaw, when he

was an infant? Did you stop at any point in time?

- 139 - Ms. Hufstedler: No, but I just changed how I practiced. I folded up my downtown office and

opened my little office at home. I didn't have a secretary, but then I never

had a secretary, so that wasn't a surprise. I just went downtown to the

County Law Library to read cases.

Ms. Edmon: You would just work into the night, is that a ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's right. That's how it happened.

Ms. Edmon: When your son was young, how did you juggle things like sporting events? or

I don't know what your son's interests were ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I arranged car pools, of course, with my neighbors and their children

and quite a few of the youngsters had the same kind of interests and the same

kind of games and things like that, so we traded off. We worked it out. I did

a lot of weekend driving to make up for the times I couldn't drive during the

weekdays.

Ms. Edmon: I guess the bench is fairly accommodating in terms of trying to take some

time to get away for children's issues, and you had lots of vacations?

Ms. Hufstedler: I had a lot of vacations, but I didn't notice that there was any accommodation

made to women with children when I was on the bench. You're just

supposed to work it out somehow. And most of them do. Of course, you

have to be very careful to have chosen your gene pool properly to have the

stamina that's required in order to do it.

Ms. Edmon: I have a sense that Morrison & Foerster has family-friendly policies, like leave

policies ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it does for all the secretarial help and the other help. They have

- 140 - flextime and do a lot of things that are very accommodating to women with

children, and men too, but that has not extended to the range of lawyers as far

as I've been able to tell. Of course, it's very difficult to do lots of times,

because, when you're doing all corporate work, when you have a closing, it

doesn't matter what your family obligations were. A closing's got to be

accomplished, and when you've got a trial, you have to meet the deadlines

and get the preparation done, no matter how inconvenient it may be. It's well

that women have to learn to do without much sleep sometimes.

Ms. Edmon: How have you and Seth split up the household-type duties?

Ms. Hufstedler: Seth has always managed to do all of the kinds of financial work that needs to

be done, that's a big help, and he's always been accommodating about such

things as arranging his schedule when he can, so that when I do my weekend

shopping he's here to help me offload the groceries. He even knows where

to put things, or most things.

Ms. Edmon: Shocking.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes! Well, it's taken a little time, but he's broken in now after 57 years, you

know, his learning curve has not had to be as heavy as it might have been

otherwise.

Ms. Edmon: My comment about shocking really was made in jest, he seems incredibly

supportive.

Ms. Hufstedler: He is. He's very smart and very supportive.

Ms. Edmon: Do you feel that over the years secretaries and support staff treated you any

differently than your male colleagues?

- 141 - Ms. Hufstedler: No. Most of the secretaries have been female, and they understand the issues

just fine without any lessons from me.

Ms. Edmon: How about junior lawyers? Have they treated you any differently than male

colleagues?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. By this time, I'm kind of an old icon, so that they've been very, very

helpful, and sometimes embarrassingly respectful. I begin to think I should

come in on crutches and a wheelchair.

Ms. Edmon: How·do you think technology has affected you and your practice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Just like it's affected everything else in the world. When I started practicing

law, downtown law firms represented middle income people and represented

small businesses, and the practice was confined primarily to local businesses,

sometimes they were regional, but few law firms represented any companies

that were transnational, and you could have named the multinational firms on

one hand. There were very few of them, so we didn't have to get into that,

but now you do, and, of course, it involves many issues with respect to who

can practice what law where and under what circumstances, and, of course,

everything from the internet to the Blackberry has affected how everybody

practices law today. It's just a different world. I refuse to carry around a

Blackberry, because I don't want to have my voicemail and my e-mail

following me everywhere I go. I just say no to that. Cell phones can do most

of it anyway.

Ms. Edmon: What did you find most satisfying or rewarding about each of the positions

you've held?

- 142 - Ms. Hufstedler: Well, each one of them has had their own rewards. I found it refreshing to

learn to practice law with some very, very fine lawyers who taught me a great

deal. They didn't start out to be mentors, but they were, and that's been true

in every job I've ever had. I've always found somebody who was willing to

spend some time to teach the things you have to know, but you have to find

ways in which the person will be comfortable with you and you can be with

him or her, as the case may be, but I think most people learn how to do that.

If they don't, they lose the race very quickly; so, it was just a question of

figuring out how to really get acquainted with people and understand their

sides of the story, whatever it may be, and that's true whether you're working

cheek-by-jowl with another lawyer or when you're representing a client at

long distance. It's just a question of finding out where they come from in

terms of culture and attitude and all these things. But I have never found

anytime I haven't been able to work it out one way or another. Some things

are more comfortable than others, of course, but you know, there are prickly

jurists and prickly executives everywhere, and the question is how do you

handle them without getting on the spines, but you can usually figure out a

way to do that.

Ms. Edmon: You had a number of different positions in the Superior Court. Was there one

that you liked better than the others?

Ms. Hufstedler: I really enjoyed law and motion and writs and receivers. I thought that was

great fun, and I very much enjoyed the appellate department of the Superior

Court.

- 143 - Ms. Edmon: Challenging spots.

Ms. Hufstedler: They are.

Ms. Edmon: I think that writs and receivers department may be the toughest spot in our

court.

Ms. Hufstedler: It's a tough spot, and the current judge of that department has really done a

remarkable job. You have to be a glutton for punishment in terms of the

amount of work you have to do and do it in a hurry.

Ms. Edmon: You have to be decisive and you have to do it quickly.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right, and you just have to pray that whatever you do is going to do

more good than harm, so those issues are always tough.

Ms. Edmon: I think that was no different when you were sitting there.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, when you're worrying about what to do about strikes and what you're

doing about things that have to be decided right now, you don't have enough

time to go through endless amounts ofbooks to figure out what the right

answer is. You have to do the best you can to try to do the least harm to the

most vulnerable.

Ms. Edmon: Taking it under submission for ninety days really doesn't work.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it doesn't; it has to be done and it has to be done now. You can't simply

do a bunch of discovery and find out what's best for everybody. You have to

take your best shot at it. I've been very pleased that when I first developed

tentative decisions in every case when I was in law and motion, I was the only

court of which I'm aware in the country that did it-now courts all over the

place are doing that. Of course, a lot of it to me is rather peculiar, because

- 144 - my tentatives were, one, tentative, and were short, but it did reduce my time

on the bench by more than half, which is why I was free to sit in other

departments, substituting for other judges, which I did quite a lot. I wrote all

those decisions by hand, I didn't have any law clerks or anybody, and so I

wasn't going to write a treatise about it. Now, if one was dealing with a

motion for summary judgment, you had to spell it out so the appellate court

and the clients' lawyers could understand what you were doing and why, so

then you had to write something that was more extensive.

Ms. Edmon: What would they do with your handwritten tentative? Would somebody tum

it into an order ultimately, and that's how it would become part of the file?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it became part of the file, because all of the tentatives were given to

either a court reporter or to my clerk in that department. I initially called

them all notes, not tentatives, but the lawyers certainly learned in a hurry that

I did that in that department for reasons which were only too much apparent

in a while. It turned out that, even though I had an odd-numbered

department, there were two departments that undertook law and motion at

that time, and all of a sudden I had twice as many cases coming to my

department as came to the other department. Well, of course, the lawyers

and the process servers and all the rest got the hang of it and figured out what

part of the line they ought to be in to be in the odd-numbered department, so

the lawyers liked it a lot.

Ms. Edmon: It's amazing how they can work it that way.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they really can. It doesn't take them very long, anymore than it-you

- 145 - don't realize what a small community a Superior Court is, or any court is,

because if any lawyer imposes upon the clerk in the clerks' office or on a

judge or any of the court attaches, that went faster than a rumor about

something unkind that somebody had done, a very different kind of structure,

it was almost immediately.

Ms. Edmon: Word gets around.

Ms. Hufstedler: In a hurry.

Ms. Edmon: Just think how effective you could have been if you could have posted those

tentatives on the internet and gotten them out ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I don't know that it would have made that much difference. At least

each of the lawyers was prepared without knowing what the tentative would

be. Of course, a lot of them were very, very short, because I would say

something like ''what would you do about Ipswich against Glockenspiel,"

and then cite to the case, and if they hadn't read it, they would know they

were in deep trouble if they didn't have a good explanation.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about bar associations. What bar associations have you been

involved with over the years?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, when I was first admitted, I became a member of the Women Lawyers

Club. It was not an association at that time-it didn't become a bar

association until later. At that time, there were about a hundred women who

belonged to it. Very few of them were engaged in active practice, but that

was developed, because women were not admitted to the Los Angeles

County Bar Association, and that's the way it was until by the time I had been

- 146 - in practice for five years, women were admitted to the LA Bar. But it took

time, and I found the women were very interesting-I enjoyed them a lot-I

eventually became president of that so-called club, but there was an

interesting group of women who were there. Some of them had been in

practice from the very early days back in the days in which Mabel Walker

Willibrandt was a lawyer, and, after all, the only reason she got the equivalent

of a cabinet position was because it was the days of prohibition, and they

wanted to give this job, which had all kinds of hairy probabilities of being a

disaster, to a female, so if she flunked the course there was only a woman

who was to blame; that's the way it really was.

Ms. Edmon: Did Women's Club ultimately tum into Women Lawyers Association of Los

Angeles or is that a different organization?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. It was at the time I joined the Women Lawyers, there was another

women lawyers group that came from all over Southern California, and we

merged those two to create what became the bar association, and it worked

very well.

Ms. Edmon: Were you involved in the LA County Bar as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I spent a good deal of time working on ethics issues for the LA Bar. I

was never an officer of the LA Bar, nor did I have any reason to want to be,

but I thought that was a worthwhile thing to do and I did.

Ms. Edmon: And then the State Bar? Did you get involved in State Bar activities?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not really. I spent a little time at it, but very little time. I didn't attempt to

have any office in the State Bar. One in the family was plenty.

- 147 - Ms. Edmon: Yes, Seth did his share.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, and then some.

Ms. Edmon: What about the ABA?

Ms. Hufstedler: I served on some special committees. One was a relatively small committee,

which was engaged in different issues affecting the Federal courts; that was a

very active committee. It did have some irony because it was, I say, not a big

committee, I think there were nine ofus on that committee. That man who

was then chair of that particular committee made the mistake of setting up a

luncheon meeting for the committee at what was the Metropolitan Club

without realizing that the Metropolitan Club did not admit women for lunch,

period. He couldn't believe that as a United States circuit judge I was going

to be excluded, but he was very apologetic about it, and by way of

recompense he sent me a bouquet of flowers. It made me look like I'd won

the fifth at Belmont! Unfortunately, it was delivered at 2:00 in the morning!

Well, it was Frank Worthschneider, he was very upset about that, but he just

didn't realize how gender-biased these organizations were, and, of course, in

the major business clubs downtown, such as the California Club and the

Jonathan Club, women were permitted to attend, but they could never walk

through the front door. I made up my mind years before that, although I

would attend some meetings there, that I refuse to be a person who is going

to speak. Ifl'm going to be invited to speak to a group, I want to be able to

walk through the front door like any grown-up would; so, that's changed.

- 148 - Ms. Edmon: The California Club and the Jonathan Club you couldn't go through the front

door?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, there was a women's entrance, and you went up in the women's elevator

to the women's dining room, because that's the way it was.

Ms. Edmon: Amazing. Now, were those really the two main clubs that were

discriminatory?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, the main clubs, period. The University Club didn't have that kind of

exclusionary policy, but many of the major firms preferred to use their

favorite business clubs, and the only explanation that was given to me at the

time was that "I don't want my wife to come here with all of her gabbling

friends," which was hardly the same issue, but just goes to show that there

was a good deal of misunderstanding about the issues.

Ms. Edmon: The year that you were excluded from lunch at the Metropolitan Club, were

you actually on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: But that didn't make a difference?

Ms. Hufstedler: Not the least. I was female, therefore verboten. Well, quite a bit has changed

for the better. There's still plenty of ways to go, but there are some things

that have changed.

Ms. Edmon: Other activities in the ABA that you can recall?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, that's the only one in which I was very active.

Ms. Edmon: You've gotten a huge award from the ABA. At some point, I'm going to

have to ask you about awards that you've gotten, and I've got a feeling that

- 149 - that's another one I'm going to need help on.

Ms. Hufstedler: I think you probably will, because there's a plethora of material there.

Ms. Edmon: I'm sure that's true, so maybe before the next time we get together I could

get that list from you.

Ms. Hufstedler: Sure, I'll give you that list along with sending that report from the United

States Commission on Immigration Reform.

Ms. Edmon: That would be great.

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't want you to be swamped with that. I'll only give you the final report.

There are a lot of interim reports, but I think the final report you would find

interesting.

Ms. Edmon: That would be great. I believe you're the only woman who's ever gotten the

ABA award, right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I was the first woman, there's been one since then.

Ms. Edmon: Oh, there has?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, as I remember it was Justice O'Connor.

Ms. Edmon: You make us proud with all of the awards, but that was particularly special.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it was very nice indeed.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about your politics. Have you been active in politics at all, other than

that one moment in time when you were in the Carter administration?

Ms. Hufstedler: Zero. Of course, all the years I was on the bench I couldn't be active in

politics in any way, and I always voted and things like that, but I was never

conspicuously involved. Indeed, I didn't even go into anything that

resembled a political meeting.

- 150 - Ms. Edmon: Any temptation to get involved after you left the Carter administration?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I think enough is plenty.

Ms. Edmon: ... you were thrown in in every sense of the word?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I did what I had to do and, whether it was on the campaign trail or

whatever, but I decided that had been more than enough.

Ms. Edmon: Do you consider yourself to be a feminist?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, but I consider myself first of all a woman, and I care deeply about issues

that involve feminism where there's any discrimination or bad treatment, but I

feel that way equally so about people of color and all sorts of other issues

where there's all the kinds of prejudices about Jews and about people who

don't look just like me. All those things have been a matter of concern to me

for many years. I think human beings ought to be treated with dignity

whatever their color of skin or whatever they do or whatever their religious

views are.

Ms. Edmon: We had a fascinating conference, I think weekend before last, at the court

that was a diversity summit, and you would have loved it. It was really a

remarkable affair. The old Department 1, the presiding judge's courtroom,

was absolutely packed full with standing room only, and we heard from the

professors of the law schools about how we need to get more diversity in the

pipeline, even before law school and in law school, and then the second panel

was Gov. Davis, his appointments secretary Burt Pines, and the current

judicial appointments secretary John Davies, and Tim Simons, the governor's

appointments secretary.

- 151 - Ms. Hufstedler: Wonderful. What a change. Burt still has input.

Ms. Edmon: Yes, I do think he does. Fortunately, Gov. Schwarzenegger has been very

open to these issues.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I think so.

Ms. Edmon: His appointments have been 30% minorities in the last year of his

appointments.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I think he's done a very good job in beginning to balance out the

appointments.

Ms. Edmon: And currently the LA Superior Court is 30% non-white.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's a big change and a big help.

Ms. Edmon: Very exciting, but anyway it's just an event that I know you would have

loved.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I would.

Ms. Edmon: Do you consider yourself to be pro-choice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I think that pro-choice means you have a choice or you have none, and

I just don't believe that it's the business of others to decide the issue of

pregnancy and birth. People make it their business when I think it is not.

Ms. Edmon: This will take a while. What are your pioneering achievements or what we

would call "firsts?"

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, being the first woman on the Ninth Circuit was a first for that circuit,

but, of course, it was second in the United States, because the first woman

who was appointed was a prominent suffragette, and she ran successfully for

the Supreme Court in Ohio with the help of women, and then she was named

- 152 - to the Sixth Circuit, but she had died before I was appointed. The pickings

were, after all, fairly slim at that time, so it was hard to find anybody who had

what looked like qualifications at that particular juncture, and, as I mentioned

to you, when I was admitted to the bar, we were only able to identify seven

women in the whole state who were admitted to the bar that year.

Ms. Edmon: What are the greatest challenges that you think you have faced as a woman in

law?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it is first to defang people who suspect you ofbeing given to being a

giggling girl, or something. The expectations that a woman would be able to

sit down and think just as thoughtfully and as unbiasedly as women do and

can as with men, and particularly in settings in which women are not well

known.

Ms. Edmon: Do you have many women friends?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, I'm very fortunate to some wonderful women friends.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think your gender has ever been an advantage instead of a

disadvantage?

J\Js. Hufstedler: I don't know that it's been an advantage, but I think there are some instances

where it's ~een helpful because in dealing with who is telling the truth about

something in relations between males and females, I think being female gives

you a little more insight than males oftimes have, and there are other instances

in which I think it's been helpful to have a different insight for how women

ought to manage their affairs or what they can arrange with respect to their

estates and so forth, because they can be easily picked on if they don't have

- 153 - good legal advice. I think it helps, because bankers have not been invariably

helpful to go out of their way to do anything to help women whose husbands

have primarily handled all their finances.

Ms. Edmon: All right, why don't we wrap it up. We're at the very end ofthis tape.

END OF SESSION

- 154 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

FIFTH INTERVIEW

May 28, 2007

This is the fifth interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on May 28, 2007.

Ms. Edmon: OK, we're going to go back on the record on this next tape. We're again in

Shirley Hufstedler's home, and it is May 28, 2007, Memorial Day. Let me

start by saying congratulations on your getting the Beacon of Justice Award.

Ms. Hufstedler: That was very nice. Ordinarily we don't care much for encomiums, but it was

a very nice party.

Ms. Edmon: It was jointly given, just for our readers, by the Los Angeles County Law

Library, to Seth and Shirley Hufstedler together. I unfortunately was not able

to attend the event because I was out of town, but I hear it was a wonderful

affair. I actually have watched the tape, the DVD, of the program. Have you

got one of these?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, for heaven's sakes! I haven't got one of those, but I've got .... Thank

you very much.

Ms. Edmon: Well, let me give that to you just so that you've got it. It was wonderful to

put a face to the name of Steven Hufstedler. Your son was one of the first

people to give introductions. He did a terrific job.

- 155 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Oh, he's a very bright young man. Well, not so young now, he's in his,

he's 53, so he's out of the teenage group by considerable years.

Ms. Edmon: He was introduced as being an anesthesiologist. Where does he

actually practice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Orange County.

Ms. Edmon: He's got four children?

Ms. Hufstedler: He's got three blood children and two step kids.

Ms. Edmon: And one of the children was there at the event?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, Heather, one ofhis stepdaughters-she's a very nice girl.

Ms. Edmon: I realize that we haven't devoted much time to him on this tape. I thought

maybe you could say the names of his children and what they do?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, our son, Steve, our one son, is an anesthesiologist, a graduate of the

medical school at the University of California Irvine. He spent some time

being a medical teacher at Irvine, but when his children were born, it was

necessary for him to have a little more lucrative occupation, so he went into

private practice. His eldest child is named after me, Shirley Hufstedler. She

is graduating from Harvard next month. We'll be there to see her graduation.

His second child is Esteban. Esteban is finishing his second year at MIT, and

he'll spend his summer mostly with us, because he has a job at Jet Propulsion

Laboratory. He is a scientist and engineer. He is happy to be working at

JPL. Then, his smallest child is Sherry, by his second wife, and she's now

nine years old. She's growing up fast, of course, but has not yet reached the

terrible teens. And then he's got a stepdaughter, Heather, I mentioned to you

- 156 - earlier, and he has a stepdaughter, Olivia, who is fourteen and is very active in

a number of things like the farmers' association group. She does a lot of

work with that. Her father, her natural father, is an owner of a spread of

grapes, and he has vineyards, and he has also livestock, and she's big on

livestock, so she enjoys all those activities. They're really quite a lively

group.

Ms. Edmon: Heather, is she a lawyer?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, she's still an undergraduate. She dropped out of school for a while

because she wanted to work, which she did, and now she's back in school

starting at University of California at Santa Barbara shortly.

Ms. Edmon: What was Shirley's emphasis at Harvard?

Ms. Hufstedler: Biology. She originally thought she was going to be a doctor, but she

decided that a third-party practice, which is what medical practice is about

today, is not what she really wants to do, so she's volunteered to spend a year

in Mexico upon graduation working in a public service organization devoted

to healthcare. She's still making up her mind about what graduate school

she's going to go to, so we don't know what she's going to do yet.

Ms. Edmon: No lawyers in the crowd yet.

Ms. Hufstedler: Nobody that's turned onto law, but I have some faint hope that she, my

granddaughter, might be interested in going to law school because she's very

"cause-y," and she might as well learn what she has to know in order to do

something that's practical and what she's interested in, but I don't know yet.

I'll have a chance to talk to her when I see her this month.

- 157 - Ms. Edmon: That's great. And Steven's second wife, what's her name?

Ms. Hufstedler: Her name is Diane. She has remarried, and she's pretty much estranged from

the family.

Ms. Edmon: I appreciate you sending me the-it wasn't actually the full report, but it was

a copy of your remarks, the testimony as a result of your serving as chair of

the US Commission on Immigration Reform. It was an interesting report and

particularly now, when we're reading all about immigration efforts these days

with the new bill. I just want to ask you a few questions about your time

doing that. It looked like about a five-year effort?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: First of all, who appointed you?

Ms. Hufstedler: I guess Clinton appointed me. The trouble is, as you well know, that when

Congress has very sticky issues that it has a hard time dealing with, its

favorite technique is to appoint a commission to go out and study it, and then

after the commission studies it and produces lots of reports, it's carefully put

on the shelf and neglected completely for another five years at which time

Congress appoints another committee to find out why the first committee

didn't do a job that was acceptable, and that's where we are. The issues are

very important and the concern about illegal immigration is, of course, one

that's very real, but how to handle it and how to regularize people who are

already here is a bone of contention, of course, and in the political season,

people are always wooing the votes of those who can vote, and there's a lot

more anger about illegal immigration than there is support for immigrants. Of

- 158 - course, one of the ironies is that with all the outrage about immigrants, it's

vitally important to the economy of the United States that we have

immigrants. After all, when the baby boom became a bust after the end of the

Second World War, the fact is we haven't produced enough children to

produce the workers who are necessary to fulfill all the kinds of jobs that are

necessary to be done. That isn't only just the grubby work, of which there's

an enormous amount. When there's so much red tape by employers who

want to hire talented people from other countries, the employers almost

throw up their hands, and yet, those people are very important to the health

of the American economy so that there are tugs in all directions and the

question is, who is mad at whom the most to decide what issues are really

going to be resolved. The commission spent an awful lot of time looking at

all of these issues in depth. It isn't that we held hearings all over the Untied

States, but we also held hearings in Africa and Europe, and we obtained a

great deal of information that must be conveyed. And, of course, one of the

things that's pretty obvious is that immigration law has developed over a

period of time into a hodge-podge of things, all of which responsibilities are

distributed among many federal organizations, which are not coordinated.

One of the things we wanted to do was to regularize who knew what with

regard to immigrants and who has what responsibilities. So far, nothing has

been done about it, which is a shame.

Ms. Edmon: As I recall your recommendations, it was not to create a new ..

Ms. Hufstedler: . . . cabinet-level department. That wasn't going to solve the problem at all.

- 159 - Ms. Edmon: ... but to make clear who was going to take responsibility for which tasks.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, exactly.

Ms. Edmon: No steps were taken in response to your recommendations?

Ms. Hufstedler: Nothing at all. It was extremely disappointing, because there was a great deal

of thoughtful work by some very able people. It was an unusually fine group

of talented human beings who knew a great deal about the subject matter, all

of whom have been completely ignored.

Ms. Edmon: How many people were on the commission?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there were ten ofus on the commission, and then, of course, there were

plenty of people who were retained by the commission to do a lot of work,

which they did.

Ms. Edmon: One of the things I wondered was how you went about doing your work, I

think you called hearings?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, we held hearings in the United States and in other countries, and Susan

Martin was extremely talented on this program, and she's a professor who did

a great deal of work. She's still very active in immigration affairs, but she no

longer works on the commission.

Ms. Edmon: You have any thoughts about the new immigration bill that's currently

pending?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it has many flaws, as you can find easily, and it has a lot ofissue_s that

are not specifically addressed, and it fudges most of the real issues that have

to be decided. So, unfortunately it's business as usual in Congress, especially

in a period of frenetic concerns about elections.

- 160 - Ms. Edmon: When there's so much wrangling, I guess it's pretty hard to tell whether

anything will come out of that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I've got hope that somebody will use some sense along the line. They

might even consider the idea of taking a look at what has already been done.

Ms. Edmon: What a concept.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, not a very popular one, I might add.

Ms. Edmon: It was interesting to read this testimony that you had given before Congress.

Have you given testimony on other occasions?

Ms. Hufstedler: I've given testimony constantly over the years. Of course, when I was

Secretary of Education I was on the Hill a great deal of time, because all of

those issues had to be debated before Congress, and, of course, because I had

a new department, many of the people in Congress decided it would be a

wonderful opportunity to test the constitutionality of the one-house veto and

all sorts of things. The Department was the guinea pig, and so I was on the

Hill just every week. Of course, I testified a great deal before Congress when

I was on the bench too on matters affecting the administration of justice. It's

never been one of the joys ofmy life, but I've done it often, so I'm not

surprised when I get the call to go do it again.

Ms. Edmon: I found an interesting article on the internet about your time in the

Department of Education, and it was an aspect I hadn't thought about. It

was an article in the Harvard Crimson. It was called "Hufstedler Meets

Washington." It was a discussion about you being an outsider to Washington

and to the whole education process, and what a good job you had done

- 161 - coming in; some had concerns whether an outsider could really do this, and it

was talking about what a remarkable job you'd done in a very short period of

time.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Well, that was very kind of the writer, but I had not been a stranger to

education at all. I had worked in various parts of education for many, many

years, so that part was not a surprise. There were lots of surprises. One of

them was, when I undertook that job, there was a hiring freeze in the federal

government, so I had to go begging around to every federal department and

agency to try to bargain for vacancies, because I couldn't build a department

with no jobs, so that was a big chore, and I finally got that one done. Then,

of course, the other thing was that when I was appointed it was at the time in

Washington parlance of the "passback," that is to say, the time when the

Office of Management and Budget had given to all of the agencies and

departments in the federal government target numbers for what the budget

was going to be. Well, I looked at that and decided they had made some

serious mistakes, and it was necessary for me then to go through the Office of

Management and Budget myself to take appeals of all of these things, and

then, of course, it was necessary to carry that budget through Congress.

Also, I personally had to do appeals to the President and Vice President with

respect to various matters I thought the Department really needed, so it was a

constant job. I was used to working hard, but at that job it was 18 or 20

hours a day, seven days a week. I got home one weekend, one Easter

weekend, that's all; all the rest of the time I was working in Washington.

- 162 - Ms. Edmon: Incredible.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, the job has to be done, and you have to do it.

Ms. Edmon: And appeals you certainly were familiar with.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, but not necessarily appeals in these structures of government. But I had

some wonderful help, two people particularly: Liz Carpenter, whom I

persuaded to come back to Washington. Liz had been with the Washington

press corps for thirty years before she became Lady Bird Johnson's press

secretary. She knew about where every body was buried on every street in

Washington and was only too happy to recount the burial details, and she

was, of course, extremely adept at dealing with the press. She was a huge

help, and a woman by the name of Cora Beebe--- her name has changed since

then because she's gotten married in the last couple years-and she was a

budget expert, so she gave me a great deal of information. In one three-day

weekend, I took off from Washington with her, and we went off to a resort

and spent three days, in which time she sat there and taught me all of the

programs of the Department of Education, because I had to learn them all,

and taught me the budget process. She was terrific.

Ms. Edmon: How many people were actually in the Department?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there was nobody but me to begin with, and then I began interviewing

for the Presidential appointments, because they had to be decided first, and,

of course, in the Department of Education it was vital that the Department's

leadership reflect the composition of people in education, which meant that

every time I selected one person, I wanted to be sure that the color of that

- 163 - person was appropriate to the particular educational qualifications of that job

so that every time I made an appointment I had to look at what everybody

else looked like, and then choose the very best person who had a different

look to take the next position. Of course, it was also vitally important that

the person be appointed with respect to higher education who was extremely

well known in the educational world, and I selected for recommendation to

the President Anthony, who had been chancellor of the University of

California, and he was very good.

Ms. Edmon: I think actually this article mentioned him. I thought you'd get a kick out of

the fact that the author said you have not abandoned your strong liberal

record on the bench as a champion of the rights of women and minorities.

Ms. Hufstedler: Boy, I didn't, of course, for a very good reason. Women of course are more

than half the population, and the minority population in many areas is now

more numerous than the traditional white males, so it had to be reflected in

the Department.

Ms. Edmon: Maybe I didn't understand this portion of the article right-it said of the

department's 17,000 employees ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it didn't have 17,000 employees that was a common mistake that was

printed. That included all of the people who were overseas schoolteachers,

who were supposed to be transitioned into the Education Department from

the Department of Defense. It didn't happen, but that's what was included in

all this. That wasn't true at all.

Ms. Edmon: And so how many employees were there?

- 164 - Ms. Hufstedler: I can't give you an exact number because I'd have to go back and check, but

I think there were about 900.

Ms. Edmon: Still quite a few.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's a lot.

Ms. Edmon: When you sent me the report to Congress, the copy of the testimony to

Congress on the immigration reform, you mentioned in your cover letter that

you had served as a guest jurist sitting with the Supreme Court oflsrael.

When did that happen?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's true. Well, while I was still on the bench, I was still with the

Ninth Circuit, but I was very fortunate to be able to be invited to sit on the

courts oflast resort ofNepal and Israel and on the high court in India.

Ms. Edmon: What was that experience like in each instance?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, they were all very interesting people, and for the most part I thought

they were extraordinarily able, much more broad-minded than I thought they

would be under the circumstances, and I enjoyed the experiences very much.

Ms. Edmon: And this triggered something else I was going to ask you about-Steven,

when he was giving his remarks at the law library event-commented about

you teaching English to some children in Nepal.

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, that's true. When I was in Nepal-and I had been there many times-I

did spend some time trying to teach children some English, and I would

give-----when we were trekking in Nepal I would always take a group of things

to give schoolmasters, because their means were very slight, so these were

things like paper and pens and pencils and a few very modest-sized pamphlets

- 165 - about English, because it was very helpful to those who were trying to teach

with so little to do it with. They had very modest means indeed. That was

always entertaining.

Ms. Edmon: You did that when Steven was a child? I think he was telling the group that

he remembered observing this as a child.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I did that a lot over the years.

Ms. Edmon: And how many times have you been to Nepal?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I think we counted fourteen times.

Ms. Edmon: And the most recent was just last month?

Ms. Hufstedler: In May.

Ms. Edmon: So that was earlier this month.

Ms. Hufstedler: One of the ones I admire very much is a woman by the name of Olga Murray.

Olga had been a career clerk with the California Supreme Court. She made a

trip to Nepal some years ago and got fascinated by the place, and on less than

a shoestring, she created the Nepalese Youth Opportunity Foundation. She

now runs a school for boys and a school for girls in Katmandu. She has

undertaken to find a means to buy a pig or a goat for rural families who have

almost nothing and who sell their children for almost nothing to so-called

contract operators who tum them into virtual slaves when they're 13 or 14

years old; so, she has found that she could substitute these animals that the

family could rear on what produce they have around, and they can avoid

selling their children and then the Foundation buys the school uniforms and

books and the girls are now in school. She's rescued about a thousand girls

- 166 - already, and she's working on more. She also has developed wellness clinics

for small infants where they can be restored to health by teaching the mothers

what they have to use in order to feed them properly, so she's done a great

deal of good, and in her effort she has also taken children from the streets,

and those who've been crippled, she manages to raise the money to bring

them to the States and have surgery and make them well; so, she's done a

very great deal of good in Nepal. I had hoped to see her on this visit, but

unfortunately I could not find a telephone number for her in Nepal. I don't

know why, and I intended to see her again. I visited some of her schools

before, and she's done a superb job. She's really a benefit to the country.

Ms. Edmon: You indicate in this cover letter as well that you've served on a multinational

panel for jurists in Europe to decide whether Kurt Waldheim should be tried

for war crimes. When was this? Tell me about that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's right. Well, see it's been about ten years ago now, and I was

invited by some people in the States to do that. This was put together-there

was a film made about it, and there were jurists from Sweden and France and

Germany on that panel, and we heard the testimony for about two weeks on

all the items that happened to Kurt Waldheim. The real issue is whether or

not he personally had something to do with the victims of The Holocaust.

We decided there wasn't enough evidence to say that he did. He was

involved in it, but he was not the director, the instigator of any of those war

crimes. That was what it was all about.

Ms. Edmon: Where did you sit to take the testimony?

- 167 - Ms. Hufstedler: We sat in Europe.

Ms. Edmon: And were there others in the United States who participated?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. I was the solo member on that one.

Ms. Edmon: How many total people were involved in that effort?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, the people on the panel, there were seven of us, but there were a lot of

other people who had a great deal to do with it, of course, including all the

evidence collection that went on before we undertook the task.

Ms. Edmon: You mentioned there was a film made ofit. Do you remember the name of

the film?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't recall the name of the film at all, but the hearings were filmed and part

of them were shown in the United States.

Ms. Edmon: You know how you were selected for that?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't have any idea, they never told me.

Ms. Edmon: I have a biographical sketch, and it says that you served as a delegate from

the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control with Irwin Griswold, former

solicitor general of the United States and dean of Harvard Law School,

negotiating nuclear arms agreements with the Soviet Union for nine years.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's correct. That's what we did. While we met both in the Soviet Union

and the Soviet delegation came to the States as well, unfortunately nothing

was done about it initially by the United States, but what did happen is that

the Kremlin got very interested in what we were doing and the Soviet

reaction was good enough then that the Congress reacted to what the Soviet

Union did, and made some significant advances toward nuclear arms control.

- 168 - We met with a great many people in the Soviet Union. It was necessary for

me, of course, to learn at least some working Russian, so I had some good

university teachers who would come to my house on a weekend and give me

lessons. Unfortunately, not much of it remained after ... but then I also had

to learn how to give a speech in Mandarin Chinese and Farsi, and German and

French and my wonderful academic friends helped me with that one too. And

with nuclear arms control, my good friend Dr. Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel

laureate in physics, has been a friend of mine for many years, and he came to

teach me the rudiments of nuclear science, so I had a great deal of help in

doing what I was asked to do.

Ms. Edmon: Quite an education in every sense of the word! When was this?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was. Well, part of the education, the things like Farsi, were when I was

still in the Cabinet, but the work on the nuclear arms control ....

[INTERRUPTED BY TELEPHONE CALL]

Ms. Edmon: The telephone call was from Seth, and he's out walking. What is Seth doing

these days?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, my husband is a dedicated walker, of course. The two ofus have

walked up and down mountains all over the world. I can't go to 20,000 feet

anymore, and I don't even have the urge to try, but we both walk a lot. He

usually walks somewhere between 4 and 8 miles a day. I oftimes take him to

Dodger Stadium. I've dropped him there, and he walks into the office from

there. So, he's got his plans made to renew his trip to the top of

Mt. Whitney for his 85th birthday. He was there on his 75th birthday, on his

- 169 - 80th birthday, and he's going to do it on his 85th birthday.

Ms. Edmon: Incredible. And when is that?

Ms. Hufstedler: His birthday is on September 20. We both know that if you're going to

survive being old, keeping your head working and your body moving is vitally

important, so we try to do both.

Ms. Edmon: We are in La Canada, and he's apparently walking into Pasadena today?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: We were talking about negotiating the arms agreements.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, well, Irwin and I were good friends even before we undertook this task.

We spent-these meetings occurred over a period of nine years. I didn't do

any of that, of course, until after I left public service, so this was all pro bono.

It took a lot of time obviously, but it was a very important thing to do, and

the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control was a group of very active

lawyers who were deeply concerned about trying to do whatever could be

done to prevent any nuclear holocaust, and all ofus were very much

concerned about it, and, of course, we still are. It did provide some thawing

of the relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States because of

the Soviet Union's response to all of these meetings we had with the then­

USSR. I think it was very productive.

Ms. Edmon: This was after you left the Department of Education? Does the Lawyers

Alliance still exist?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. It's changed its name slightly, but it still exists.

Ms. Edmon: When you met, who were you meeting with over in the Soviet Union?

- 170 - Ms. Hufstedler: Initially there were delegates from several organizations who were also

concerned about nuclear problems. What we were doing-all of the reports

went to the Soviet Union as well as to the United States. A number of

decisions that were made at the time were heavily influenced by what we

were able to discover in our meetings back and forth.

Ms. Edmon: This biographical sketch talks about the various places that you have actually

served as a visiting professor. I will tell you the list, and I'll let you confirm.

This says you've been a visiting professor at UC Irvine, University oflowa,

University ofVermont, Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, University of Oregon, and

at Oxford, England.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, all of the above.

Ms. Edmon: Is that the complete list?

Ms. Hufstedler: As far as I can recall at the moment, it is.

Ms. Edmon: In each of those circumstances were you going for a single lecture or were

you there for a semester, or ....

Ms. Hufstedler: It varied considerably. I was a holder of an endowed chair at Stanford Law

School where I taught for what amounts to little more than what would be a

semester, even though Stanford was on the quarter system at the time. I gave

lectures, and I also conducted seminars on various kinds of topics I thought

would be of interest to the students, asking them to put their minds to doing

things they hadn't done in law school, such as finding out if they could create

ways in which you could have school buses take children to school and their

parents to work while they shared the costs, which would reduce the cost per

- 171 - trip, but it would also give some kind of assurance that the children were

going to be safe on the way to school. Now, of course, you have to deal with

insurance companies, unions, school boards, all sorts of things to make those

things happen. I wanted them to understand the complications of trying to

undertake what should be obvious is an assistance to the schools and the

parents, but understanding how many hoops have to be gone through in order

to accomplish that. The same thing is true of trying to find ways in which to

have some public health facilities put into schools, which could give

healthcare to teachers and to students, and at the same time, provide care for

outpatients who lived in the school district. That could also reduce the cost

of delivering healthcare services to people who needed it and who were

disadvantaged financially, and to get reduced amounts of expense for

healthcare for students in school and the faculty. All of those things required

a good deal of thoughtful work. I didn't succeed in finding anybody who

found ways to put that together without a great deal of pain and strain, but at

least it gave them an opportunity to think hard about how many kinds of

organizations you have to move to accomplish things that are obviously of

real benefit to the community. I thought they would learn more by trying to

figure out how to solve problems that were really national problems rather

than think about only A versus B, because the big issues are not going to be

solved by Smith v. Jones at all. I think they learned a good deal. They

produced some thoughtful papers, and it gave them something to think about.

At other schools, I was simply in residence and visiting with professors and

- 172 - giving some lectures in universities. When I was at Oxford, I was teaching a

seminar-I was in residence, of course--and also gave one major speech, that

one on the relationship between the United States Supreme Court and the

Presidency in the history of the United States, which they didn't know very

much about, of course.

Ms. Edmon: When you say "in residence," what do you mean by that?

Ms. Hufstedler: I lived on the campus.

Ms. Edmon: How long were you at Oxford?

Ms. Hufstedler: Three months.

Ms. Edmon: I'll just run down this once and see if you have any specific memories about

what you were doing at that place. UC Irvine?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was also lecturing. I was visiting with a lot of the professors there too on

what kind of courses they were teaching and what issues were of significant

interest in the courses they were teaching. I wanted to learn more about how

they were teaching, and I wanted to learn what they really wanted to know

that was ofbroader interest to the community.

Ms. Edmon: It was a law school or undergrad?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was an undergraduate occasion, as was the University in Northern

California ....

Ms. Edmon: University oflowa?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was visiting with the professors, and I gave a couple of lectures.

Ms. Edmon: University of Vermont?

Ms. Hufstedler: Same thing.

- 173 - Ms. Edmon: Now, Phleger Professor of Law, that was Stanford?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was Stanford, right.

Ms. Edmon: Regent's lecturer, UC Santa Cruz?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's a regular regency lecture, and I was lecturing to the faculty and

students.

Ms. Edmon: Do you recall what about?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, no, it's been too long ago

Ms. Edmon: Robert Morse Chair lecturer? I guess many of these date back in the early

80s, so it was a while ago.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that was a while ago, and I was very much involved in all those issues at

the time, of course.

Ms. Edmon: University of Oregon?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was the Morse Chair. Lecturing.

Ms. Edmon: We were just talking about some of your lectures. We haven't even

scratched the surface. This indicates that you were a faculty member of the

Appellate Judges' seminars for the Institute of Judicial Administration?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I did that a number of years. I was teaching newly appointed federal

appellate jurists and newly appointed state supreme court justices.

Ms. Edmon: Was this while you were on the bench?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. There were lots of issues on which we had a lot to say to one another­

things that were very common had to do with habeas corpus and various

kinds of exhaustion of state remedies, as well as different kinds of ... their

debates, struggles and conflicts between what happens in the federal and state

- 174 - courts, and there was a lot of conversation about that. Most of the judges

hadn't had the occasion to learn much about that, so it was important that

they got up to date.

Ms. Edmon: This also indicates that you were chair of the law faculty of the Salzburg

Seminar in American Studies in Austria? What was that all about?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Well, it still goes on. The Salzburg Seminar was put together many

years ago, particularly after the Second World War, when there was a great

deal of misunderstanding about the United States and its relationship to

Europe and the various countries in Europe; so, the Salzburg Seminar was

put together many years ago at that time. Usually federal appellate judges

were chair of the faculty, but the rest of the faculty were all American law

professors. That's an in-residence program for three months of the year, and

one lives in the castle in Salzburg, to which was added, an added attraction of

course, all of the wonderful musical events that happen in Salzburg. So, it

was a very, very entertaining occasion, and when I was teaching there, many

of the students were young men and women who came from former iron

curtain countries who'd never known any freedom in their lives. They were

absolutely exhilarated with the experience, because they lived there too,

everybody ate together, and then there were lots of occasions when we went

out to have social evenings, concerts at the various places in Salzburg,

because the Music Festival was on at the same time; so, there was a

tremendous amount of real enjoyment for everybody there.

Ms. Edmon: You did this while you were sitting on the federal bench?

- 175 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I took a vacation doing that.

Ms. Edmon: Now, it also says you were a guest lecturer in England, France, Bulgaria,

Israel, Jordan, Iran, India, Nepal, Malaysia and Sweden. Is that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, all the above.

Ms. Edmon: And you were talking about ... well, why don't you tell me what you were

talking about?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, mostly, I was talking about legal issues at the time that affected both

the United States and these various countries, depending on what the political

situation and what the laws were. Obviously the text would vary from place

to place, so I spent a good deal of so-called vacation time lecturing in all

those countries.

Ms. Edmon: We hadn't talked about the foreign languages that you have learned over the

years. Y 9u mentioned Russian and Farsi and Mandarin Chinese. What other

languages have you learned?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I didn't learn the languages-that's not accurate. I learned to give

speeches in the language, and I learned enough to be able to carry on the

simplest kind of conversation. Irwin Griswold and I got a big kick out of

finding our way around Russia on the subway system, because we had to be

able to read the signs in Russian for where we wanted to go. Well, it was a

struggle, but we made it. So, it was important to be able to speak enough in

the language that people could understand what you were trying to say. I

always have wanted to learn the polite words in every language, the hellos,

the goodbyes, and may-I, and that sort of thing. Well, I can manage that, I

- 176 - even remember most of those terms, but the greater details have long since

faded, because I haven't used it.

Ms. Edmon: So, it's your practice to do that before you go to any foreign country?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: I found in one of the books at the law library, the county law library, a paper

prepared by the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies called "Women in the

Law." I'm not sure what that was. Was this a speech that you gave or ... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I wrote papers for the Aspen Institute, and I also lectured and

occas.ionally taught there.

Ms. Edmon: We were off-the-record for a moment, and you were commenting that you've

given so many speeches that the location and the text begin to blur. What

have you done with all your papers and all of these speeches over the years?

Ms. Hufstedler: I still have them around, most of them. I'm not sure where I can lay my

hands on all of them, but I still have a lot of them.

Ms. Edmon: This one is fascinating. This was back in 1976, and it's part of a bicentennial

lecture series, I think. This was your discussion about the history of the

women's movement and all the way literally starting back with discussion of

Jefferson. And you also talked about the Equal Rights Amendment; I'd like

for you to tell me your thoughts about the Equal Rights Amendment, and

why it didn't pass.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it's overdue, but there are two things about it. First, many, many

women were frightened about the Equal Rights Amendment, because they

were not prepared to undertake responsibilities they would be given to be

- 177 - able to see to themselves, and it frightened a lot of men that their position

with respect to women might be changed in a way that they would find very

distressing. When you think about being equal, it means you're going to have

equal responsibilities as well as equal opportunity, and there were more and

more women who had less opportunity and more dependency that could not

easily manage to move themselves to the position of equality. So, the fact

that it's the only thing that has to be done doesn't mean it's going to happen

in a minute, because there are too many people who are going to be either

surprised or disappointed by having to accept things they don't want to

accept in their lives because they've been reared differently. Not only reared

differently, but educated differently.

Ms. Edmon: Were there other speeches you gave where the topic was women?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, I discussed women a lot of times, particularly talking to women

about what they could do for themselves, but also talking to men about that

came up a lot of times, and what are women doing on the bench, for example.

I know it seems odd that on your court I was the only female and 119 men.

They had no idea what the world could do with this bizarre creature, but they

changed their mind fairly quickly, because I was in the trial department the

first year, but that was the last time I was in the trial department. Then I was

made to be presiding judge of all the pretrial departments, for instance, then

law and motion for two years, but at the same time I was doing all of the

overflow for writs and receivers, so it was at that time I developed the

concept of having written a preliminary view about how the case should come

- 178 - out. Nobody had done that before, and it was considered very bizarre, but

the lawyers liked it a lot, so even though I had the odd number, I had

department 63, and my neighbor had more law and motion, after I issued

tentative opinions in every case-of course, I did them all myself, I had no

law clerk-I wrote all those by hand, they were not elaborate, but, because I

read all the advance sheets, if there was a case that had come down that

affected the point, I would simply say, "What do you do about Ipswich

against Glockenspiel", cite the case, and then the person in whose favor it

was, decided it wasn't necessary to argue, and that cut the argument time in

less than half; so, it saves so much time. I then had time enough to substitute

for other judges in other departments, whether the family law department or

whatever, so I got a chance to learn quite a bit about what other judges were

doing.

Ms. Edmon: That building that you were in, when you were with the Los Angeles Superior

Court, were you in 111 North Hill Street?

Ms. Hufstedler: It was a brand new building then. It was all new, can you believe it?

Ms. Edmon: No. That's amazing. I may have neglected to ask on the tape before about

who appointed you to the various judicial positions. The first LA Superior

Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was Pat Brown.

Ms. Edmon: And then the California Court of Appeal?

Ms. Hufstedler: Pat Brown.

Ms. Edmon: And then the Ninth Circuit?

- 179 - Ms. Hufstedler: That was President Johnson. Of course, what happened was, my life turned

around because one ofmy former law professors when I was in solo practice

had left teaching and went to the California AG's office to undertake most of

the hard work on putting together Arizona v. California. I initially started

doing research for him, and then I became one member of the three ofus who

wrote the briefs for the special master in the U.S. Supreme Court. The

California Attomey General at that time was Pat Brown, so when he became

governor, he appointed me to the Superior Court.

Ms. Edmon: And I think we talked in a prior discussion that there wasn't an actual

application form in those days. Was there for the California Court of Appeal

either?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: And for the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: Your appointment process for the Ninth Circuit, the nomination process, did

that all go smoothly? We've seen in recent years some difficulty in some of

those.

Ms. Hufstedler: There was only a bit of a ripple about that, because there wasn't another

female on the Federal Appellate Court in the United States at the time. There

was quite a bit of conversation with me about what I was going to do when I

was there. Was I going to decide cases? People just couldn't really conceive

that some females should be able to do that, but I did have a plus in that I had

been on the California Court of Appeal before I was nominated to that

- 180 - position. Of course there were quite a few members of Congress that had

known me for years, so there weren't as many rough questions as I thought

there might be; so, that went relatively smoothly.

Ms. Edmon: You have also served on a number ofboards. I've got Harman International

Industries and ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, indeed. Hewlett Packard.

Ms. Edmon: OK.

Ms. Hufstedler: US West. Those are the private corporations.

Ms. Edmon: Do you currently serve on any of those?

Ms. Hufstedler: I currently serve on Harman International. I've reached the age of statutory

senility with respect to the others. I'm retired from those boards.

Ms. Edmon: And then you were on the Board of Trustees for the Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace? That must have been interesting.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, it was. That was not as active a job as the rest of them were by any

means.

Ms. Edmon: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Institute for Judicial Administration?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Natural Resources Defense Council?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

- 181 - Ms. Edmon: Council of the American Law Institute?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And then you're on the governing boards or visiting committees of the United

States Military Academy at West Point?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: The Institute for Civil Justice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Harvard Law Schoo 1?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Stanford Law School?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: University of Pennsylvania Law School?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: USC Law Center?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Institute for Court Management?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Constitutional Rights Foundation?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Advisory Council for Appellate Justice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: American Judicature Society?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. If you look out the window, you'll see a deer strolling by the front

- 182 - window.

BREAK

Ms. Edmon: Well, we took a break to see the fawn out in the front yard. In Los Angeles,

who would believe it?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we live up in the hills-you get all sorts of livestock.

Ms. Edmon: Hewlett Packard and US West we already mentioned, and the United States

Commission on Immigration Reform. Is there anything in particular about

service on those boards that stands out in your mind?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, a lot of things do, but the reason I was. appointed to the Hewlett

Packard board is because Bill Hewlett and I became good friends, because we

both served on committees to choose White House fellows and Rhodes

scholars, a chore which we undertook over a period of several years. I

became very well acquainted with Bill at that time. We became good friends.

Dave Packard was not enthusiastic-after all he was a devout Republican,

and I was obviously a Democrat, so he was very concerned that I would

upset his applecart and probably ruin everything in the place, but he adjusted

to it and what really changed his mind is I had undertaken an inside

investigation of complaints about misdoing, and it turned out that one of the

misdoings was a man that he had hired who was doing a lot of his personal

work, but he was being paid by HP, and he was not doing the right thing at

all, and was ripping off the company and Dave. When Dave found that out,

he made me chair of the audit committee. You never can tell how such things

will tum out until you try. We got along fine thereafter.

- 183 - Ms. Edmon: How were you involved in picking externs or White House fellows?

Ms. Hufstedler: That was a committee, two different committees, and Bill and I served on

each of them. They were regional committees, they were subcommittees in

each of those instances to make nominations for White House fellows and for

Rhodes scholarships. We reviewed the candidates and then we made some

selections. We learned a great deal about each other during that time.

Ms. Edmon: And when was that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Golly, it's been years ago now ... let's see, in the late 60s and early 70s.

Ms. Edmon: The awards are many.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, an embarrassing number.

Ms. Edmon: The list that I have is the Marshall White Medal from the College of William

and Mary? Tell me about that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Well, it was just one of many awards, and I don't single out anything in

my memory that distinguishes it from many other similar occasions.

Ms. Edmon: OK, then I'm going to list them all and then you can tell me anything you

want to about any of them, if anything stands out: St. Thomas Moore Medal

from Loyola Law School, the Golden Plate Award from the American

Academy of Achievement, Woman of the Year Award from the LA Times,

Woman of the Year Award from the Ladies Home Journal, UCLA Medal,

Herbert 0. Harley Award from the American Judicature Society, the Earl

Warren Medal from the University of Judaism, the Louis Brandeis Medal

from the University of Louisville, Shattuck-Price Memorial Award from the

LA County Bar Association, Stanford Law School Award of Merit, the

- 184 - ABA's 1995 Gold Medal, the Margaret Brent Award.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, many of those were very, very good occasions, needless to say. I was

particularly pleased about the ABA Medal, because I was the first woman in

the history of the ABA who had ever received the ABA's highest award. I'm

very gratified to receive that, and for which I have to thank a number of

people, of course, and the ones that stand out are those that are firsts, of

course, and I was very appreciative of the number of people who were

instrumental in getting that done for me. Thereafter, Sandra Day O'Connor

received the ABA Medal, and also the Margaret Brent Award.

Ms. Edmon: The Margaret Brent Award luncheon is always a wonderful affair.

Ms. Hufstedler: Very pleasant. A lot of that was because I was the first female to have many

of these positions that I held, and that made me stand out a bit.

Ms. Edmon: It does, but I know particularly with the Margaret Brent Award, so much

emphasis is placed on not only women who are "firsts" but who also are

willing to bring other women along.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, of course, that's vitally important to me and always has been. It's

important for women to realize that (A) they can, and (B) supporting other

women is vitally important thing for any human being to do. Supporting

other people makes a difference in life, as we all know. It isn't simply

because you make friends that way, it's because you know you can make a

difference, and to me if you have great opportunities, you squander them if

you don't share the opportunity to use that to help other women.

- 185 - Ms. Edmon: That's why you got the award.

END OF SESSION

- 186 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

SIXTH INTERVIEW

October 13, 2007

This is the sixth interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on October 13, 2007.

Ms. Edmon: OK, believe it or not, it's October 13, 2007. We're once again in the

home of the Hon. Shirley Hufstedler, and we'll begin. Good morning!

Ms. Hufstedler: Good morning, Lee!

Ms. Edmon: First of all, congratulations! I understand that you have been selected for

the lifetime achievement award by the American Lawyer. It seems that

every time we start one of these sessions, you're getting some new

award, so congratulations! Much deserved.

Ms. Hufstedler: Thank you, but it's getting embarrassing, you know.

Ms. Edmon: I thought that we'd spend just a few minutes covering some of the things

that I may have left out from some prior tapes. First of all, last time we

were together Seth was about to celebrate an 85th birthday. How did

that go?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, it was all fine except that we were ... he was going to climb

Mt. Whitney again, and I went with him, but the weather turned so bad

that he had his hands frozen, so we had to tum around and go back.

Ms. Edmon: And you went with him on the trip?

- 187 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And did you climb for part of it?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I climbed part of it, but I don't like the rest of it. The last bit up

Mt. Whitney is a struggle, because it's got innumerable rocks, and I just

don't care for that kind of climbing.

Ms. Edmon: Just before we turned the tape on I was talking to you about an

interesting issue--why was it that there were so many years that went by

without another woman on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's just because women didn't go to law school at that time. They

obeyed the social dictates, which after the Second World War that was

they all went back home to have families and were ridiculed if they had

jobs outside the home.

Ms. Edmon: So there was a long gap of time really without women in the profession?

Ms. Hufstedler: That is right. After all, when I was in law school there were originally

five of us who began Stanford Law School when I did, but three of them

dropped out, not because of academic disqualification, because they

decided they didn't like it. One woman and I graduated from Stanford

Law School at that time.

Ms. Edmon: One of the questions that I was thinking of as I was going back and

reading some of our prior sessions is whether you thought that your

experience as a trial judge on the L.A. Superior Court prepared you for

other challenges you had later in your career.

- 188 - Ms. Hufstedler: Of course it did, because not only did I have to learn what it was like to

be on the other side of the bench when I became a judge, but I also had

to learn how to do a lot of other things that I hadn't known that much

about: how to listen to witnesses with a different kind of attention. Of

course, it did help that I was a very fast shorthand writer, so if there was

an interesting bit of testimony and I didn't want to have anybody pay

much attention to what I was doing, I simply took it down verbatim in

shorthand, which was a help.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think it helped you later in your years as an appellate judge to

have spent some time on the trial court?

Ms. Hufstedler: It obviously did, because one of the things I noticed very, very strongly

when I was on the trial bench was that many appellate court opinions

simply didn't give any directions for what was really intended to have

happen as a result; so, if you don't give actual directions, you shouldn't

be surprised as an appellate judge that the trial court ended up doing

something that you didn't intend. I had to learn how to use what was

said by an appellate court to come to a responsible conclusion in trial.

Besides, it helped a lot in reading records to have a lot more ideas about

how witnesses and lawyers behaved in the trial court.

Ms. Edmon: I read somewhere that you thought that skills that you developed as a

lawyer and as a trial judge were of some help to you on the U.S.

Commission on Immigration Reform when you had varying views, to

reach a point of agreement.

- 189 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I think that was true. Listening to all sides-not only from the

people who were on the commission who had different views, but also

from the people we listened to, not only in hearings across the United

States, but in Europe and Africa-that was easier for me, I think, to sort

out what people were really trying to say without being stuck in

whatever the lapses were in the verbiage.

Ms. Edmon: Was there a varied view among commission members even about

approaches?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I'm not so sure it was different about approaches, but they had

different ideas depending upon what their life careers had been; so, it

took a little time to see ifwe could come to agreement on a lot of the

issues, and, of course, there are still issues that are very divisive in this

country.

Ms. Edmon: Such as?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, are we letting enough immigrants into the country? What are we

doing to train them properly to become citizens? Why should we think

of different ways to treat different kinds of immigrants depending upon

their backgrounds? That means you have to know something about what

their backgrounds are and were, and that makes a difference in whether

they would adjust and whether people would accept them. I keep trying

to remind people that the United States is a nation of immigrants,

whether you've just arrived or whether your ancestors arrived, because

that's the truth, except for native Americans, and even they were

- 190 - immigrants from Alaska and places like that as well many, many decades

ago.

Ms. Edmon: I think I also read somewhere that you became gravely ill while you were

in Africa?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I did. I just got very, very sick and had to tum around and come

back, but that can happen any place we are traveling, including the

United States. After all, there's nobody who knows anything about it

who does not realize that being on jet planes is a great disease factory.

Everyone who's there generously passes along whatever they have to all

the rest of the passengers.

Ms. Edmon: I was reading back at our discussion about your grandmothers and your

mother, and particularly how your mother had to quit school at a certain

point when she got married. Had either your grandmothers or your

mother ever expressed any dissatisfaction with their roles as women and

the constraints that were put on them?

Ms. Hufstedler: My mother certainly did. She had strong views about that subject, and

she didn't call it discrimination, but that's what she was talking about.

Of course, she had a hard time when she was a youngster because she

grew up in a pioneer area of the country in which there was virtually no

medical help of any kind, and in which getting any kind of an education

was a big, big problem. We didn't have many rural schools in those days,

and only itinerant people seemed to offer any help medically. It was a

difficult time.

- 191 - Ms. Edmon: Did she express her frustration about that to you or to the family?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, she talked about it sometimes, and, of course, I knew enough of

her history to know that she'd had a very tough time when she was

growing up. And also, when she was educated, she had a scholarship to

university, which was a first and a rare kind of thing at that juncture, but

she had a brilliant academic record when she finally got to school, but she

couldn't take it, because by that time her father had left her mother, and

she had to support her blind mother, so she had to go to work instead.

She later did get her degree, but with great difficulty, a lot of it by

correspondence.

Ms. Edmon: Did your grandmother go to college?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it was out of the question. Of course, my mother's mother was

blind. She couldn't go to college. She was blinded when she was seven

years old by an itinerant who decided to treat her conjunctivitis by

putting blue vitriol in her eyes, burnt the lenses. Of course, they had no

cornea or other kinds of implants at the time, so she remained legally

blind for her life.

Ms. Edmon: Law school. During law school where did you live?

Ms. Hufstedler: I lived in a room in a private home. I tried to live in the barracks that had

been set up for students, but it was impossible, because trying to study

when they've got radios playing different stations all over and having one

foot locker in which to put all my apparel turned out not to be anything I

wanted to do; so, I made an effort and found rooms in a private home.

- 192 - Ms. Edmon: The barracks were like a dormitory?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they were like a dormitory but they were really barracks, and they

hadn't changed much since the soldiers occupied them during the war.

Ms. Edmon: When you were in college, you were in a sorority. Did you live in a

sorority house or ...

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I lived at home at that time, because it was a short commute to

college. I spent the night there from time to time, but I didn't live there.

Ms. Edmon: In law school, could you describe your relationship with the other

women who were in the class?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we were friendly with each other, but we were not immensely

close. They were not as academically interested as I was, so I had more

time talking to other law students than I did with the two women who

were there. They were rare birds, and sometimes I wondered whether I

could recognize their plumage. Of course, there were some things that

never would happen today. That is, when a professor would ask me,

"and what would a reasonable woman do under the circumstance?" I

think that question would not be posed anymore.

Ms. Edmon: Were there women in the other classes in law school?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: Whatever happened to the woman who did graduate with you?

Ms. Hufstedler: She didn't actively practice law. She got married, had several children,

and the maximum she did was to take legal interest in the management of

her parents' estates.

- 193 - Ms. Edmon: After law school, were you ever drawn to government work, like the

DA's office or the Public Defender's office?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I wasn't. In the first place, there wasn't a Public Defender's office at

that time, and the enthusiasm about having a female join any of the public

legal offices was subzero. It was not so many years later when I was

trying to encourage the City Attorney's office to hire a woman, that I

was asked whether I'd like to join myself; that was not my intention at

all, but it was hard to convince people. It was really the same problem as

in private law firms.

Ms. Edmon: When you got out oflaw school were there any women in the DA's

office?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. In the US Attorney's Office there had been a woman or two that

were hired during the Second World War, but otherwise there weren't

any.

Ms. Edmon: I noticed somewhere that before your work on Arizona v. California was

done, Pat Brown became governor and then Stanley Mosk became the

Attorney General?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. Of course, the reason I became involved in Arizona v. California

was that one ofmy former law professors hired me to begin doing some

legal work, and was sufficiently pleased with it all that I became the

person to write all the briefs for the Supreme Court of the United States

and for the Special Master. At that time, Pat Brown was Attorney

General, and I became a consultant to the Attorney General. Pat got

- 194 - acquainted with me then and it was he who appointed me to the Los

Angeles County Superior Court.

Ms. Edmon: Did you actually work with Stanley Mosk as well?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes. We worked together, but not for a number of years. Stanley

Mosk would become AG at the time Arizona v. California was argued in

the Supreme Court, and he decided that he wanted to argue part of the

case, but he didn't realize that it's open season, and that he wasn't really

prepared to go into the kind of detail that had to be done in that case; so,

he retreated gracefully as quickly as possible.

Ms. Edmon: Who took his place?

Ms. Hufstedler: Mike Elie, a man who became my law partner later on, and Burt Gindler,

but Burt was an encyclopedia at the bar, and he sat at the counsel table,

and any time Mike Elie wanted to know something, he'd just reach over

there and Burt Gindler would hand him exactly what he wanted. He was

very, very helpful.

Ms. Edmon: Were you able to sit at the counsel table?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, no, I was not permitted to sit at the counsel table, but I listened to

the argument, of course.

Ms. Edmon: Did women argue before the Supreme Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: I think they probably did, but there were so few of them that I never saw

any.

Ms. Edmon: What was the political reaction to Pat Brown appointing a women to the

- 195 - Los Angeles Superior Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I think it was more of a shock than anything else. It was very

quiet, but nobody knew quite what to say about such an oddity. There

would have been a bigger outcry if somebody had appointed an ostrich,

but there was almost silence about me.

Ms. Edmon: Were women and men in the legal community supportive of a woman

being appointed to the court?

Ms. Hufstedler: They were pretty quiet about it, because, after all, if they'd said anything

very ugly they might find themselves coming up before me, and they had

enough discretion to decide that wasn't a peach of an idea.

Ms. Edmon: I also read somewhere that there was an interesting group of women, I

guess USC grads, that started the Women Lawyers Club?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, they did, but that was many, many years before I became a member.

That was in the interregnum between the First and Second World Wars.

It was a repeat performance of what happened after the Second World

War. Some of the women who had been totally homebound went out to

work during the First World War and decided that was what they wanted

to do, so they continued to go into the legal profession and other

professions. That lasted almost until the Second World War came along.

Ms. Edmon: Were those folks still living and practicing when you came along?

Some of them were. Now, Mabel Walker Willibrandt wasn't around.

Ms. Hufstedler: She had been appointed to the U.S. Attorney General's office with the

wonderful task of trying to enforce the laws against any liquor. It was

- 196 - not a job any man wanted, so they gave it to her. She did as much as

anybody could under those circumstances. When I joined the Women

Lawyers Club, there were a hundred ofus. Now, there were two women

lawyers groups, one for the Southern California women lawyers and one,

the Women Lawyers Club. The Women Lawyers Club consisted almost

entirely of women who were or had been in active practice in downtown

Los Angeles. The Women Lawyers Association was countywide, and

eventually the two got together with some degree of enthusiasm on the

part of a number ofus to form what is now the Women Lawyers

Association of Los Angeles.

Ms. Edmon: Were you active in both of the organizations when they were separate?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. I was only active in the Women Lawyers Club. It met in downtown

Los Angeles, and the Women Lawyers Association met in many other

places that were not convenient to me at the time.

Ms. Edmon: Was there a reaction from the press to having a woman appointed to the

LA Superior Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Actually, it was mostly silence. The idea of having a zebra come into the

zoo was ... when nobody else was, was sufficiently odd that a lot of the

curiosity ... there wasn't much interest in it.

Ms. Edmon: I read somewhere about an instance where you were giving a speech to

the Wilshire Bar Association, something about the intricacies of writ and

receiver practice, and somebody from the press came in at the end and

said something like "Do you cry when you go home at night?," do you

- 197 - remember that?

Ms. Hufstedler: I certainly do. It was a sappy question, but it was that kind of ignorance

that always was challenging.

Ms. Edmon: Do you remember what you responded?

Ms. Hufstedler: I simply said, ''No, do you?"

Ms. Edmon: Everybody must have loved that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there was a giggle around there. I think that the pressman was a

little baffled, but everybody else thought it was fun.

Ms. Edmon: You've given me some of your papers, and I appreciate it so much, and

they will go along with this oral history. One of the things I've noticed is

that over time you've written and spoken about the functions of the

intermediate courts and creating new intermediate appellate courts.

Maybe you could just briefly describe your opinions about that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I have. Well, one of the difficulties is that many of the appellate

courts over the years have become extremely overworked, and therefore,

trying to find ways to ease that burden while at the same time

recognizing that there's nothing odd about it-because we have created

appellate courts of some specialties for many year. The question is

whether or not we can create some swift-run courts in which we could

have some access to appellate justice by middle-income people. Middle­

income people now have almost no access to these courts, nor do they to

private lawyers, because the amount of equipment and expense of

running a downtown law office simply prices them out of the range of

- 198 - ordinary people, and I think that's a great disaster for people. And

efforts have been made, of course, to include more information on

websites about various kinds of the routine problems that beset ordinary

people, but that doesn't begin to get to the kind of help that's really

needed. I have studied hard to try to get some major law firms to agree

to create a private foundation, which would meet the needs of middle­

income people. Of course, they have a great benefit by themselves, not

only by their tax deductions, but if they'd have second and third year

associates, who really need more experience in handling interviews with

clients and all that sort of thing, have an opportunity to do that by

spending six months of the year working for less money, they would

learn a great deal and come back to the law firm with much more

experience than what their expenses were. I haven't gotten very far with

that, but it's still a good idea.

Ms. Edmon: And the concept of creating additional appellate courts to relieve the

pressure, has there been any interest in that?

Ms. Hufstedler: So far, there's been none I have experienced. I'm trying to figure out

how you structure these things so you don't end up with the

jurisdictional squabbles that have created some snags that are pretty hard

to unravel.

Ms. Edmon: I have heard rumors that over time you had been recommended for a

spot on the United States Supreme Court. Maybe you could tell us

- 199 - about that?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's true. Well, there had been interest expressed in that from time to

time, but that was because, of course, at the time that interest began,

there were so few women in the legal profession that had become

prominent, that the pickings were pretty slim, but the only person who

seriously considered it, I think, was Jimmy Carter, who said that ifhe had

one he would have appointed me. I don't know whether he actually

would have, but he didn't have a chance because he had no appointment

to the court.

Ms. Edmon: How do you feel about that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I thought it was inevitable, but by the time it was really practicable

to be considered at all, I had had my time within the beltway, and my

enthusiasm about living in Washington and having my husband and

grandchildren on the west coast had no appeal at all; but of course, you

have to have a fairly small mind if you don't think that sometime it would

have been interesting to be a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. I've

known them all except for the latest two appointments for many years.

Ms. Edmon: And had discussions with them about the experience?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, we discussed quite a bit of different kinds of issues that come

before the Supreme Court, but we've not discussed that particular topic.

Ms. Edmon: When you got the call that you were being nominated to the Ninth

Circuit Court of Appeal, were you eager to go the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: I was not eager, but I was interested because the jurisdiction of the

- 200 - United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit is simply enormous,

geographically and as a matter of subject matter. It's a very challenging

court.

Ms. Edmon: Were there any women's groups at the time who came out in favor of

your nomination to the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: No.

Ms. Edmon: Entities like the National Women's Political Caucus, was it even around

at the time?

Ms. Hufstedler: If it was around, it was hiding.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think it makes a difference having women on the bench?

Obviously now times have changed.

Ms. Hufstedler: I think it makes a difference, because women have a different

perspective, at least they have for many years, because life expectancies

and opportunities for women have been vastly different; moreover, I

think that women are more interested in just listening to what's really on

people's minds regardless of what they say. So, I think it does make a

difference, just as I've tried to encourage business corporations to

recognize that women as directors make a significant difference.

Whether they should or not, men and women have been trained to think

differently about all sorts of topics.

Ms. Edmon: Interesting that you've encouraged boards of directors to take on

women. How have you done that?

Ms. Hufstedler: By simply talking to the directors and CEOs when there's a vacancy that

- 201 - comes up, that it's time to consider a female. Of course, for many

business corporations their major customers are females, so it would be

silly not to have females on the board-able women, you don't want a

flibbertigibbet, male or female.

Ms. Edmon: I saw a story somewhere about how you had developed skills when you

were in the trial court for dealing with pro se litigants. There's a story

about Leon David and some contact he had with a woman who was

prose in his courtroom. Do you remember that?

Ms. Hufstedler: I certainly do, because when Leon David ruled against her, he found out

to his complete astonishment that this woman came climbing up on the

bench and fell across his lap, which was a bit heavy duty for him, I must

say-it would have been for me either!

Ms. Edmon: And then you got involved with her at some point?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, later on, after she'd had a demurrer sustained, she ended up with an

odd number, which meant she was in my trial court, in law and motion,

but I kept her fairly calm.

Ms. Edmon: I guess you take those matters under submission so you don't have to get

somebody in your lap.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right, I didn't want anybody to have the screaming meemies in the

middle of the courtroom.

Ms. Edmon: These days, when you want to have some down time, what do you like to

do for leisure?

Ms. Hufstedler: I like to plant things in my garden and watch them grow, and I like to see

- 202 - my grandchildren and play with them. They're lots of fun, so there's

plenty for me to do when I'm here when I'm not working.

Ms. Edmon: Do you still like to read?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I read constantly.

Ms. Edmon: What kind of things do you read?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I read frivolous things, I read whodunits, I read all kinds of things. I

also read solid books and articles.

Ms. Edmon: You have accomplished so much. Are there any challenges that you

would like to take on that you haven't?

Ms. Hufstedler: I haven't seen one lately. I've had enough challenges to take my fill

altogether, so I'm not looking for another heavy duty challenge. I don't

want to sit around and knit-I have knitted in my life-but, I don't find

that that's really the most absorbing occupation to have.

Ms. Edmon: At the Department of Education, what were some of the most difficult

issues that you faced, other than building the department, just in terms of

the substance?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there were innumerable issues about education that are very

difficult and very absorbing, among them, how do you get the best results

in a classroom with youngsters whose first language is not English?

That's always challenging. How do you deal with youngsters who come

from poverty areas in which there's a great deal of crime? How do you

help kids get interested in learning when they're trying to fend for

themselves in a very difficult social and family environment? All those

- 203 - are very heavy duty issues about which I care a lot, because one of the

things that youngsters need to do is learn how to love learning. You

can't instill love by having a big stick; you instill love by deciding you

really like the kids and you want them to know you do, and I have never

known a single successful person in my life who cannot remember at

least one teacher who made a difference, and I believe that one teacher

can make a difference, but several teachers can do even better so that we

have to have some regard for teachers and decide that they're not prison

wardens and that they need to be able to have an opportunity to realize

that the kids really want to know and do, but then you need to have

teachers who really like kids, and that's not easy always to find.

Ms. Edmon: Did you have gender equity issues at the time? Was Title IX an issue

when ...

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, of course it was. There was lots of hostility at that time to Title IX,

because many of the people on the Hill really thought we wanted to put

females in the middle of the major football teams in the country, which,

of course, was not the point at all, but it was a hard time. These

prejudices ran so deep that it's very difficult to reach past the emotions

and into the intellect. It takes time to do that, and your efforts to do are

not exactly greeted with open enthusiasm. There were lots of discussions

about those things. Also, a significant amount of misunderstanding. The

idea that you shouldn't have any money put into girls sports because you

want all the money to attract the best football player is not exactly a bell

- 204 - ringer for Title IX, you know.

Ms. Edmon: Did you confront a lack of privacy when you were secretary of

education?

Ms. Hufstedler: Certainly, because people wanted to know more about you than they

have any business finding out at all, so it's hard to have a private life of

any kind, but I like my privacy too, and most people do. I think if you

deprive people of privacy you find out you made holes in their soul. I

just don't believe in that, but it was hard to do, because the work was so

difficult. Besides, a person gets tired. I worked 18-20 hours a day seven

days a week, and that doesn't put you on your best mettle to meet the

hard issues, I must say.

Ms. Edmon: So there was even more of a lack of privacy than when you were a Ninth

Circuit judge?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, much, much more. Yes, everybody thinks they need to have a bite

out of you, particularly if they can conspicuously draw blood.

Ms. Edmon: Did you have any heroes or heroines in your life, either from history or

... ?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, I thought that Eleanor Roosevelt was one of my heroines, because

she didn't stay home and just ...

[TURN THE TAPE OVER]

Ms. Edmon: All right, you were in the middle of an answer, why Eleanor Roosevelt

- 205 - was a heroine?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, she didn't just stay home and do her knitting. She spent a lot of

time talking to people, and while she was ridiculed a great deal, because

she was interested in everything from miners-the type that dig holes,

that is, and take out minerals-to issues that lots of women face that

most of the country didn't particularly want to know about; so, lots of

people thought that she was overstepping her bounds as a woman, but I

never thought she did. She was interested enough in other people to

bring a number of issues to the floor, by writing her column and

speaking, that simply had not been discussed. And they needed to be

discussed. And she's annoyed a lot of people, but sometimes annoying

people is the only way to make them think about something, wake them

up a little bit, because they'd rather be somnolent.

Ms. Edmon: She obviously had a fair amount of influence over her husband, and that

reminds me, I read somewhere that you think maybe Lady Bird Johnson

had something to do with President Johnson's appointment of you?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I do. Lady Bird Johnson was vigorous in her defense of women,

and I think she thought it would do a great deal of good in the justice

system to have more women, because it isn't only men who have legal

problems, women do too, and not just issues of custody and child

support, but many other kinds of issues, because women were beginning

to develop their own businesses, and they needed to have some legal

advice that counted and have access to justice on many issues. She was

- 206 - right about that.

Ms. Edmon: Did you get to know her while you were on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I had several meetings with her, but I didn't get to know her well

until later. Liz Carpenter, who was a key person in the Department of

Education, and I were very good friends, and Liz knew Lady Bird

extremely well. She had been Lady Bird's press secretary, but she had

been a member of the Washington press corps for thirty years. She knew

almost street by street where every body was buried, and she could name

both the street and the body. She was a wonderful help to me, but she

was a close friend of Lady Bird, and because of her I got to become well­

acquainted with Lady Bird Johnson.

Ms. Edmon: It was your discussions with Lady Bird Johnson that led you to believe

that she had an interest in having a woman on the Ninth Circuit?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, because she didn't believe that women didn't have to have their

nose in almost every tent there was, for a very good reason. I think she's

right; I still think she's right.

Ms. Edmon: Did you ever belong to the National Women's Caucus?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. I was not engaged in politics at all. Of course, In all those years on

the bench, I could not have anything to do with anybody politically, and I

never did. And so, I was never really engaged, and by the time I came

back from Washington, I had head-over-teacup enough. I didn't need to

be in anybody's caucus.

Ms. Edmon: What about the National Organization for Women?

- 207 - Ms. Hufstedler: Of course I knew about it and I was interested in what they were doing,

but I was not personally active in it.

Ms. Edmon: I know you worked on newspapers throughout your young years. Did

you ever think of becoming a journalist?

Ms. Hufstedler: I thought about it, and then when I did enough of it, I decided I didn't

really want to spend my lifetime doing the same, so I decided to give up

journalism, and eventually go into law, which I did.

Ms. Edmon: You have traveled a lot over the years, and I know that you've had

discussions about the importance in your view of getting to know people

in other cultures and how they think. Maybe you could share your view

about that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I feel very strongly that we cannot know ourselves anything like as

well as we should until we see what other people think ofus and what

our cultures and what our values are. It's also a matter of general

enthusiasm for me to know about other people and how they live and

why they do what they do. Human beings are fascinating, and when you

get human beings whose culture is wildly different from your own, it

gives you a perspective on how you view your own culture when you see

it through somebody else's eyes. I've always found it absorbing, and, of

course, we've ended up having very good friends in many cultures all

over the world. It's always been a great joy to me. I think if other

people had more time to do that, they would enjoy the immigrants in our

country more than they do now, because you have to have some idea of

- 208 - where they came from and what means what to them in various sorts of

cultures, so I think that's very helpful to try to promote human

understanding.

Ms. Edmon: When do you think you formed those opinions?

Ms. Hufstedler: I did it piece by piece, from when I was a youngster and my family took

me to Mexico-my mother and father went to Mexico and spent quite a

bit of time there on various trips-and I found out quite a bit about

people in Mexico, and why their attitudes were different from the States,

and why a lot of the people who were emigrating to the United States

thought they'd have a better chance in this country, economically at

least--- that doesn't mean that they'd work as hired hands in fields for

almost nothing, but who were able to do different things. I found that

very interesting. Besides, looking at other people and how other people

see us is a way in which one can say: when you look in the mirror if you

look very closely you'll see a lot of things you may like, but you'll see an

awful lot of things you think ought to be changed.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think your parents shared that same view of the importance of

getting to know other cultures?

Ms. Hufstedler: My mother did more than my father, but they were always interested.

They were both very widely read, that helps-if you can't meet people

personally, reading about them means a good deal too.

Ms. Edmon: It's interesting, we've talked so much about your family and I don't

recall talking about family vacations. Did you take vacations?

- 209 - Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, yes, we did. Most of the time they were very modest, because

during the Depression there wasn't any money to go any place at all, so

we took brief vacations, usually in the mountains. My father liked to

fish, I enjoyed learning to fish, and my brother and mother did too, so

they were modest vacations, but we got around, and it was a nice change

to get out of the city for a change. I enjoyed the out-of-doors.

Ms. Edmon: Was the trip or trips to Mexico the only international trips you took with

your parents?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's right. Of course, by the time I was really old enough to do much

traveling, the Great Depression had happened. There wasn't any money

to go traveling. And then came along the Second World War, and we

weren't exactly going to whip off to Europe, so the travel had to be

domestic or at least just the United States, Mexico and Canada.

END OF SESSION

- 210 - ORAL HISTORY OF SHIRLEY MOUNT HUFSTEDLER

SEVENTH INTERVIEW

September 13, 2008

This is the seventh interview of the oral history of Shirley Mount Hufstedler which is being taken on behalf of Women Trailblazers in Law, a Project of the American Bar Association Commission on

Women in the Profession. It is being conducted by Lee Edmon on September 13, 2008.

Ms. Edmon: Okay. It is Saturday, September 13, 2008 and we are back in the home of the

Honorable Shirley Hufstedler for our final session of this oral history.

Good morning, Shirley.

Ms. Hufstedler: Good morning, Lee.

Ms. Edmon: All right. I thought I'd start with just a couple of things I don't think we've

gotten on the record yet. According to at least one biographical statement I

have there's a long list of places where you have received honorary doctorate

degrees and I thought I would read those. According to this biography, it

says that you've received honorary doctorate degrees from Claremont

University Center, Columbia University, Georgetown University, Gonzaga

University, Hood College, Mount Holyoake, University of Michigan,

University of New Mexico, Occidental College, University of the Pacific,

University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University, University of Southern

California, Smith College, Syracuse University, Tufts University, Tulane

University, University of Wyoming, and Yale University.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's true.

- 211 - Ms. Edmon: That's an incredible list. According to this also, just so that we've got it on

the record, you have received awards and honors: Order of the Coif, the

Marshall Wyse Medal from the College of William and Mary, St. Thomas

Moore Medal from Loyola Law School, the Golden Plate Award from

American Academy of Achievement, Woman of the Year Award from the

Los Angeles Times, Woman of the Year Award from the Lady's Home

Journal, University of California at Los Angeles Medal, Herbert O'Harley

Award from the American Judiciature Society, Earl Warren medal from the

University of Judaism, Louis D. Brandeis Medal from the University of

Louisville, Shattuck-Price Award from the L.A. County Bar Association, the

Stanford Law School Award of Merit, the ABA's 1995 Gold Medal,

Margaret Brent Award from the ABA Commission on Women in the Legal

Profession, and the Learned Hand Award.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I'm afraid they had bad taste to do all those things.

Ms. Edmon: And that actually may not even be a complete list. I think you've also won

the Ernestine Stahlhut award from the Women Lawyers Association of Los

Angeles?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And so there may be many, many others. But I did want to state for the

record what an impressive list that is.

Ms. Hufstedler: That's very kind of you. I guess they got kind of hard up finding more

women at that time.

Ms .. Edmon: I think that was not the case. I just have a few final questions to ask and then

- 212 - I'd thought we'd go through some of your papers. So some of these final

questions are, what haven't you done yet that you would like to do before

you die?

Ms. Hufstedler: I can't think of anything I really pine to do before I die. I'd like to stay well

before I die, but that's my only wish at this time.

Ms. Edmon: Wonderful. And Seth is well, I hope?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, he's very well, thank you. He's eighty-six now, and he's walking up the

mountain.

Ms. Edmon: Incredible. What are the secrets of your success?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I guess I think I can be grateful to have chosen the right gene pool. I

think that probably has as much to do with it as anything. And to try to keep

my head and my body going.

Ms. Edmon: You do spend a fair amount of time working and exercising a lot.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I do.

Ms. Edmon: And keeping active.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Speaking of successes, I think literally there's been something every time

before I come to another session, and I probably have missed some, but one

of the most recent that I've noticed was that you were successful before the

California Supreme Court in the case of Simmons v. Ghaderi.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I was very pleased about that.

Ms. Edmon: That was a great result. I think it was mediation confidentiality?

- 213 - Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. And of course Dr. Ghaderi was wrongly accused of malpractice. She

was not guilty of malpractice at all. And the fact that this patient died does

not have anything to do with the treatment she received from Dr. Ghaderi.

Ms. Edmon: Okay. Here's another tough one. What would you like as your epitaph?

Ms. Hufstedler: She didn't hurt anybody.

Ms. Edmon: And how would you like to be remembered?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, as the good wife and grandmother. I think I have been able to make a

contribution which helps me in the legal profession. And I am hopeful it will

help other women who are not yet going through the legal profession to

decide if they can make up their mind to do it and do the hard work, they will

succeed, too.

Ms. Edmon: What do you know now that you wish you'd known back then?

Ms. Hufstedler: Oh, there are many, many things I wish I had known then, depending what

''then" it was in my life. All right, I've found out that there are lots of things I

didn't know and I still don't know, but I believe would be useful ifl had

known at that time, I think that's true with almost everybody's life, by the

way.

Ms. Edmon: What is the best career advice that anybody ever gave you?

Ms. Hufstedler: I don't remember anybody ever gave me any particular good career advice. If

anything, I remember being told I couldn't do very much of anything, and I

just decided I wouldn't believe it. So it just reminds me to tell other people,

"Don't believe everything everybody else tells you about who you are or what

you should do. You're going to have to decide that for yourself"

- 214 - Ms. Edmon: And maybe that's the answer to this one: what advice do you give young

women lawyers today?

Ms. Hufstedler: I want them to know that they can succeed if they -- through a lot of hard

work they think a great deal and spend enough time to do the job right. At

least as right as they know how to do.

Ms. Edmon: Many young women lawyers today say they're unwilling to make the same

sacrifices that many more senior women lawyers made. How does that make

you feel?

Ms. Hufstedler: It makes me feel that they've got a lot more to learn.

Ms. Edmon: Some researchers have suggested that, "The first women lawyers essentially

had to become men in skirts in order to succeed in a very male dominated

profession." Do you agree with that?

Ms. Hufstedler: No. I never thought I had to tum out to be male in order to do what I

wanted to do. It was true I had to use a little more ingenuity to do what I

wanted to do than a men did who had similar education and talents, but that's

because women were about as popular as Typhoid Marys and nominees for

Dairy Queen. But men at that time just didn't believe that women were able

to do sophisticated intellectual work. But primarily what was going on was

this was after the Second World War. And what happened to them is what

happened in every other war in the United States -- during these crises,

women were told to go out of their homes and work. That meant doing jobs

that men did. But as soon as the men came home, they were told massively

they were to go home and breed. And most of them did. And if you're going

- 215 - to go home and breed you don't have much time to go to law school and do

scholarly work.

Ms. Edmon: Some senior lawyers say that they felt pressure to excel because they felt or

were made to feel that they were representing all women lawyers and if they

didn't succeed, their organization would never hire another woman lawyer.

Did you feel any pressure?

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I did not feel that kind of pressure. I decided it was my problem to make

my own reputation. I didn't believe I was out there to save the souls and

lives of other women who aspired to be lawyers. Some of them aspired to be

lawyers because their fathers wanted them to be. Not particularly because

they wanted to be, and that's not the best way for a man or a woman to

undertake a demanding pro fess ion.

Ms. Edmon: What encouraging or troubling trends do you see for women in the legal

profession?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I think some of the more troubling trends are affecting both men and

women in the legal profession. Many years ago, law firms' overhead was

very small compared to what it is today, and young men and young women

could undertake legal work for middle-income clients. Now middle- income

clients can't afford to pay the overhead occurring with respect to the lawyer's

offices in which they wish to sit and consult. So that has changed

dramatically. Also, of course, everything has changed dramatically, from

those long time ago days, businesses were mostly local, few were regional, a

handful were international, and there were virtually no multinational

- 216 - businesses. All that has changed dramatically and with this the legal

profession has changed dramatically, too. Also, the demand for higher

income for young lawyers is going up in a straight line curve, and the

competition for the best young lawyers has driven the price higher so that

many people in the legal profession realize now that very bright young

lawyers who are clerking for judges find out that they make and earn more

money than their judges did in their first year out of their clerkships. That's

sort of a shock to the legal profession. And I think it's damaging to the

image of the legal profession, too, because when the metropolitan law firms

cannot serve the interest of the majority of the people in the United States,

and lawyers have monopolated on the judiciary and have had more than their

fair share of seats in the Legislature and in Congress and on other kinds of

boards, there's understandably a good deal of resentment that's going on

about that. And I think the legal profession has to address those major issues

if they're going to come to some regard by the major portion of the

population, for good reasons.

Ms. Edmon: Do you think that women lawyers and judges practice law and judge

differently than men?

Ms. Hufstedler: Sometimes. I think that more women listen to what's not being said to reveal

a lot than a lot of men do. They take the oral representation at face value, I

think, more than women do. Otherwise, I think we're only dealing with legal

issues and such, and I don't see any particular difference.

- 217 - Ms. Edmon: What impact, if any, do you think women lawyers and judges have had on the

legal profession?

Ms. Hufstedler: I think it has been less profound than many of us women would like to

believe. But at the same time, it has changed because when men who are in

the legal profession know that women who are also in the profession are

dealing with many of the same issues, they begin to see that some of the

motivations that cause the issues that they're dealing with have a way to do

with what people think, and that thinking may be different from men and

women under many circumstances.

Ms. Edmon: What impact do you think women lawyers and judges have had on the

development of the law?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I think that women on the bench and as lawyers have had more to do

with trying to have legislatures and congress deal with the issues that affect

women and children more than their male counterparts have had because men

have not necessarily had a good idea about how much effort and time and

energy is expected in order to have a woman raise a child.

Ms. Edmon: And, that may be part of the answer to this one. What impact do you think

women lawyers and judges have had on society, generally?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I think that the realization infants don't grow by themselves and don't

learn how to speak, read, or write all by themselves. It is the difference that

women have helped men to recognize. They know it intellectually, but they

don't feel it in their bones.

Ms. Edmon: And do you think women have achieved equality in the profession and, if they

- 218 - have not, what needs to have happen in order to achieve equality?

Ms. Hufstedlet: Well, they have to look at many, many different issues that affect equality,

among them the opportunity to get a decent education, to grow up and have

decent housing, and enough to eat, and enough persons in their life who can

give them some urge to work harder to accomplish more. And inspiration,

and that means hope.

Ms. Edmon: Thank you very much. I thought I would just go through some of your

papers that we're going to include in this packet. Now, I have, from what I

think was our very first session together, a photo.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: Now, is this your original so that I should make a photocopy and .give this

original back?

Ms. Hufstedler: I would appreciate it very much because that's a picture of my father in there,

and my older brother was a baby, and my grandmother, and my great­

grandmother.

Ms. Edmon: Okay, so that the woman on the left is your grandmother?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's my paternal grandmother, Sarah Mount.

Ms. Edmon: And on the right is your --

Ms. Hufstedler: -- my great-grandmother.

Ms. Edmon: That's your father's --

Ms. Hufstedler: -- father's grandmother.

Ms. Edmon: And in the center?

Ms. Hufstedler: That's my father. The young man, obviously.

- 219 - Ms. Edmon: And then the baby is your brother?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. He's not big, but he was older than I by two years.

Ms. Edmon: It's a wonderful photo. So, I will photocopy it and then send this original

back.

Ms. Hufstedler: I would appreciate it very much, Lee.

Ms. Edmon: Now, why don't you describe for the record what that is?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I have to look at it carefully. Oh, this is part ofmy mother's family

history. Quite a few people of course have died and I never knew any of

them. That was written by my mother before her death.

Ms. Edmon: Do you have a copy or --

Ms. Hufstedler: No, I don't think I do. I would appreciate very much if a copy could be made

of that.

Ms. Edmon: I certainly will. Okay, so that's the history of your mother's family?

Mrs. Hufstedler: Yes, that's right.

Ms. Edmon: Okay. I have some speeches that you have given me. This first one is - -it

talks about the criminal justice system.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: And you make the point that long prison sentences should be reserved solely

for those intractable cases and beyond. Do you have any idea where that

speech was given or generally what the context was?

Ms. Hufstedler: I remember it was about criminal justice system. In all candor, I don't

remember where I gave it. I've written so many speeches all over the world,

I forget.

- 220 - Ms. Edmon: I am sure that's true. I have then a copy as well that's going to be included of

the Benjamin Cardoza lectures on the -- this is called the "Directions and

Mis-directions of a Constitutional Right of Privacy."

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I remember delivering that lecture.

Ms. Edmon:· And, do you remember the basic concept in connection with privacy?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there has been a great deal of misunderstanding about what the right to

privacy includes and how it should be protected because there are a lot of

differences in view on that. One person's privacy is another one's

advertising slogans, as far as I'm concerned. And this is really about some of

the ways in which I think the right of privacy has been 1) neglected and 2)

distorted to reach conclusions that were never intended by the original

developers of the doctrine.

Ms. Edmon: Okay, thank you. Then we've got a copy of what's called the "Evolving

Constitution", and essays on the Bill of Rights and U.S. Supreme Court, and

there's an article by you on "Comity and the Constitution in the Changing

World of the Federal Judiciary."

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, I remember giving this one, too, and writing the speech, then it discusses

many of the questions that are still very much in the news about federal

jurisdiction. And about the ability and disabilities of Congress, and naming

people to the federal courts. And, of course, those who believe in the

protection of minorities have plenty of adverse decisions by those who believe

in the protection of the majority no matter what happens to the people who

are left out of it, the American Dream. I think that the fact that federal

- 221 - jurisdiction has been fiddled with by Congress many times, but I haven't seen

that they have done major improvements. Not for many, many years, to be

sure the creation of the United States Courts of Appeal was significant

because you simply couldn't have the United States Supreme Court which

was trying to do the whole thing. It was not practical at all, but whenever

Congress has been upset about what federal courts are doing, then they try to

fiddle with federal jurisdiction. It hasn't, by the way, been much of a success

and neither curing nor preventing decisions with which some people in

Congress don't agree. But I think that's obvious because people in the

United States don't agree on many, many of the issues which divide the

country. They didn't many decades ago, and they don't now.

Ms. Edmon: There is a copy as well of a document called "Quiet Collapse: The Crumbling

of the Federal Appellate Structure." It appears to focus on the rising tide of

litigation and how the United States Supreme Court simply can't handle

everything that's coming from the Courts of Appeals and suggesting, perhaps,

a National Court of Appeals, or something of that nature.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, at the time I wrote this, the United States Supreme Court was granting a

tremendously greater number of hearings than it does now. Granting only a

relatively small fraction of hearings doesn't begin to resolve some of the

major issues that divide the judicial system. And at that time, I thought it

would be very helpful to create a National Court of Appeals which could take

a lot of the burden from the United States Supreme Court on cert petitions

because the court could always take those issues ofrecord if they wanted to,

- 222 - but it would spend a lot of its time worrying about conflicts among the federal

appellate courts, which could be resolved without having the U.S. Supreme

Court to take over. But if persons who might be on that National Court of

Appeals would recommend taking it over by the United States Supreme

Court, that would indicate that the issue was, in my view, important enough

to have a binding decision for the whole nation. And that movement went

quite a ways and then dropped like a stone.

Ms. Edmon: Because?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there was a great deal of resistance to having a court that was over the

top of the Federal Courts of Appeals. Federal appellate judges were not

enthusiastic about that. And they didn't want to be part of a court deemed to

be a bunch of sophisticated law clerks to the United States Supreme Court. I

was sorry that that happened because I still think it would have been a good

idea and not because the courts are taking too many, but because it's taking

too few. We don't like to leave major issues unresolved because of conflicts

in the circuits so you have one set of rules that apply in one jurisdiction and a

completely different set in another different jurisdiction. It results in

confusion and the inability from families to businesses to plan on how they are

going to lead their lives.

Ms. Edmon: We next have a copy of the speech called "Women in the Law." I think we

might actually have touched on this at a prior session, but this particular

document was published by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a

lecture series on equal justice under the law and you essentially look at what

- 223 - happened to women ever since the time of Jefferson to the present.

Ultimately talking about the Equal Rights Amendment and how it did not

pass.

Ms. Hufstedler: No, it hasn't passed yet because so far the people who could make it pass

decided that women should not be that equal. And that's a view, I'm sure

you understand that I don't share.

Ms. Edmon: And I'm grateful for that.

Ms. Hufstedler: You're living proof of why I was right and not wrong about that.

Ms. Edmon: You're very nice, thank you. We actually have another document called "The

Pursuit of Knowledge" which appears to be a commencement address that

you gave at Cal State University. I assume that you have done many

commencement speeches.

Ms. Hufstedler: It might even make my teeth ache trying to remember them all.

Ms. Edmon: I'm sure that's true. But this is a wonderful one that we'll add to the stack.

Ms. Hufstedler: Thank you.

Ms. Edmon: Then, the next is a copy of a testimony that you gave before the sub­

committee on Immigration and Claims in your role as Chair of the U.S.

Commission on Immigration Reform.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. That again is another illustration ofhow Congress can decide it ought

to do something about immigration and end up not deciding to do anything in

particular. It was too bad because we had a terrific Commissioner and a

wonderful staff. Superb staff.

Ms. Edmon: As I recall, not much came out of it.

- 224 - Ms. Hufstedler: No. It was like many of the other things that created this commission to

study many of its problems. Once they have studied it, they have put it aside

on its shelf and it's not resurrected again until they decide to appoint another

commission to find out why the first commission didn't accomplish what

miracles were supposed to have been brought about by them. And I'm afraid

it's a very common ailment of the country.

Ms. Edmon: You know that reminds me, when I was looking over your bio this morning,

there was one thing that I actually didn't remember that we have ever talked

about. There was a reference to the fact that you were a member of a three­

person delegation from theUnited States State Department and the ABA to

negotiate agreements to exchange legal scholars and judges between the

United States and the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, that's true.

Ms. Edmon: Tell me about that.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, there had been quite a bit of interest in seeing ifwe could find out about

different ways in which we could begin to ease the tensions between the

U.S.S.R. and the United States. And one of the ways was to get some of the

intellectual leaders ofboth the countries to get together and discuss issues

that the countries faced. And so I did that with former Solicitor General of

the United States, Irwin Griswold, who before that, was Dean of the Harvard

Law School. And, from time to time, Chesterfield Smith, later President of

the ABA, was part of that group. So we spent several different trips going

to the U.S.S.R. trying to discuss that with members of the Supreme Court of

- 225 - the Soviet Union and other leadership. Ultimately, there was a little bit

happened but not much because there was too much suspicion on both sides,

which was a shame because you can always have suspicions, at least

diminished, if at least leaders on both sides of the controversy have a chance

to talk together. But the enthusiasm for that proposition was definitely

muted.

Ms. Edmon: I guess it took too long to build up the trust that was necessary to --

Ms. Hufstedler: -- exactly so. But I thought that the legal leaders in both countries had more

of a chance to discuss the problems they had in common and what kinds of

means there were to address them that something decent might come out of

it. Unfortunately, nothing came of it.

Ms. Edmon: Do you know when that was?

Ms. Hufstedler: I'd have to think back. It was in the ?O's. I think I was still on the bench at

that time.

Ms. Edmon: I am going to include in the materials a copy of the oral history that you did

for the L.A. Superior Court. It was done by Judge Victor Chavez back in

2002.

Ms. Hufstedler: Quite a long time ago. I remember very little about that interview.

Ms. Edmon: Well, you were talking about -- he was focusing for at least a bit on the

courthouse, when they had a ground-breaking ceremony back in 1954 for the

new Los Angeles Superior Court courthouse. Do you recall that?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I remember it then and I remember what it was like to be in that

- 226 - courthouse when it was very first built. They didn't have a courthouse

initially for me. They assigned me to a courtroom which was really the jury

assembly room.

Ms. Edmon: Is that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. And when you were sitting on that bench, in an ordinary case, you felt

like you were trying to be an entrepreneur at a flop play. Quite unusual.

Ms. Edmon: I guess Earl Warren came out for the ground-breaking of this. And he was

Chief Justice of the United States.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes, he did. Now, of course, we need to have a new courthouse today and

nobody knows how to raise the money to get it done.

Ms. Edmon: Precisely.

Ms. Hufstedler: Even though the courthouse is earthquake damaged, and it's not a very safe

place anymore. But trying to pry money into the judiciary is never anything

the Legislature wants to tackle because too many of the members of the

legislature think all the court deals with is personal problems of other people.

And they simply don't fix to care about that.

Ms. Edmon: And it's true on both the state and the federal side. Just this morning in the

paper today I saw that they're now going back to the drawing board on the

new federal courthouse because the price has gotten so high.

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. It seems to be a complete shock to many people in both State

Legislature and Congress that the administration of justice costs money.

Ms. Edmon: This actually reminded me of - - I was going to ask you if you recall Ernestine

- 227 - Stahlut.

Ms. Hufstedler: I remember her very well. She was a close friend.

Ms. Edmon: Is that right?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes.

Ms. Edmon: What can you tell me about her?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, she was a remarkable woman for her time, I must say. She was very

bright and she had done a great deal of work when she was appointed to the

bench. She was one of those very rare birds - - she not only knew how to sit

on a limb, she knew how to fly. And she did all kinds of things that were very

helpful. She was an excellent jurist. Unfortunately in many respects, she was

ahead of her time, and those who are ahead of their time don't necessarily get

the accolades that they should have. Because they always have a tendency to

change the status quo. And most people, whether they think they do or not,

really like things as they are that they can deal with, rather than things they

don't know. She was a very good judge.

Ms. Edmon: She was on the Los Angeles Municipal Court when you were on the Superior

Court?

Ms. Hufstedler: Yes. I had known her before then, too.

Ms. Edmon: From practice?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, initially because Arnold Greggor, who's a good friend of ours was a

very good friend of hers. This is how I came to know her well. She was a

very good judge.

Ms. Edmon: And I have also found another oral history of yours that was done by the

- 228 - Federal Judicial Center. It is an oral history of women federal judges and I

will see if we can get the authorization to include that in the materials.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, that would be fine with me, if they'd say okay, I'd be delighted.

Ms. Edmon: Wonderful.

Ms. Hufstedler: Might as well save my breath and your efforts. If ever anything has already

been done, I don't see any reason to do it again.

Ms. Edmon: Well, I don't think I have any other questions. Any final words that you'd

like to add?

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, I just have to say that I am immensely pleased that a woman of your

talent has been selected to do an oral history because a lot of people think

they know how to do it, but they don't know how. And it gives ine a great

deal of pleasure to see a highly successful jurist who happens to be female

have the opportunity to learn a great deal about oral history, and to be able to

exercise her talents. I always like to see talented women be recognized, and I

think now the judiciary is beginning to recognize in a big way your own

talent.

Ms. Edmon: Well, thank you so much for those gracious words and I can't tell you how

honored I have been to have the opportunity to do this.

Ms. Hufstedler: Well, you're more than generous, my dear. I just look forward to you

becoming Presiding Judge of the L.A. Superior Court.

THE END

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