Clarice Baright (1881-1961) was an American attorney and social worker. Baright was the second female and first Jewish woman to be sworn in as magistrate of New York City. [1]
Clarice Baright (1881-1961) was an American attorney and social worker. Baright was the second female and first Jewish woman to be sworn in as magistrate of New York City. [1]
Clarice Baright, born Sadie Margoles, was born in 1881 in Vienna, Austria to Elizabeth and Shussman Margoles. The family immigrated to the United States three years later. She married George Frances Baright, an insurance salesman, who had two children from a previous marriage. [2]
Baright attended law classes at New York University while working full-time as a clerk. [2] [3] She was teased for being one of a few women attending these classes. [4] She did not formally earn a law degree, but she was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1905. [2]
She worked in the Lower East Side advocating specifically for juveniles and rehabilitating juvenile delinquents. [5] [6] She eventually earned the nickname the "Lady Angel of the Tenement District". [2] In 1915, she was recommended to the bench of the New York City Family Court division's Court of Special Sessions, but Mayor John Purroy Mitchel turned her down as a candidate. [2] She would be appointed to the position ten years later by Mayor John Hylan, making Baright the second female magistrate in New York. [2] Her term lasted only a short time, and she was unable to secure long-term appointments in following years. Despite this, she kept up her legal work, eventually becoming a formal member of the law firm Markewich, Rosenhaus, Beck, and Garfinkle. [2]
Ada Harriet Miser Kepley was the first American woman to graduate from law school. She graduated in 1870 with a law degree, from what is today Northwestern University School of Law. At that time, she was prohibited from legal practice by state court rule that denied women admittance to the bar. She finally was admitted to the bar in 1881, but did not practice. She was an advocate for women's suffrage and temperance.
Charlotte E. Ray was an American lawyer. She was the first black American female lawyer in the United States. Ray graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1872. She was also the first female admitted to the District of Columbia Bar, and the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Her admission was used as a precedent by women in other states who sought admission to the bar.
Leslie Crocker Snyder is an American lawyer and former judge, most notable for her challenge of Robert Morgenthau in the Democratic Party primary for the Manhattan District Attorney election in 2005. Morgenthau did not seek re-election in 2009. Snyder ran again. Once again she finished second, this time losing to Cyrus Vance, Jr. by a wide margin.
Mary Hall was the first female lawyer in Connecticut, and also a poet, a suffragist, and a philanthropist. In 1882, the Connecticut Supreme Court of Errors' decision to allow Hall to be admitted to the Connecticut Bar was the first judicial decision in the nation to hold that women were permitted to practice law.
Howard University School of Law is one of the professional graduate schools of Howard University. Located in Washington, D.C., it is one of the oldest law schools in the country and the oldest historically black college or university law school in the United States.
Cathy Bissoon is a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. Previously, she was a United States Magistrate Judge of the same court. She was appointed to her current position by President Barack Obama and was confirmed by the United States Senate in October 2011.
Peter Townsend Barlow was an American jurist who served as a New York City Magistrate for nearly two decades.
Violette Neatley Anderson she became the first African-American woman to practice law before the United States Supreme Court on January 29, 1926. She was one of the most prominent advocates of a landmark piece of legislation that helped secure rights and economic mobility for sharecroppers in the South, the Bankhead-Jones Act.
Elinor Byrns was an American lawyer, pacifist, and feminist, co-founder of the Women's Peace Society and the Women's Peace Union.
Alice Parker Lesser was an American lawyer, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Mary Yvonne Carter (1923–2010) was a Saskatchewan judge. She is notable as the second female magistrate appointed in Saskatchewan history and one of the earliest female law graduates in that province. She was later elevated to the Court of Queen's Bench for Saskatchewan, where she sat for many years.
The History of the American legal profession covers the work, training, and professional activities of lawyers from the colonial era to the present. Lawyers grew increasingly powerful in the colonial era as experts in the English common law, which was adopted by the colonies. By the 21st century, over one million practitioners in the United States held law degrees, and many others served the legal system as justices of the peace, paralegals, marshalls, and other aides.
Anna Moscowitz Kross was a Russian-American lawyer, judge, and public official. She was New York City Commissioner of Correction from 1953 to 1966.
Charlotte C. Holt was an American activist and lawyer. She worked for the Protective Agency for Women and Children (PAWC) during the rise of the Labor Movement in Illinois. After she became a lawyer, she focused on expanding the rights of working-class women and children, and she helped to found the Legal Aid Society of Los Angeles.
Emma Fall Schofield was, along with Sadie Lipner Shulman, the first female judge in Massachusetts.
Regina Guha was an Indian lawyer and teacher. In 1916, she fought a notable case challenging the interpretation of legal provisions that effectively prohibited women from practicing law in India.