Elizabeth Bartholet Interview Transcript

This item is featured in:

Elizabeth Bartholet Oral History

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project  

 

Elizabeth Bartholet 

Interviewed by Susie Penman 

April 10, 2024 

Cambridge, Massachusetts 

Length: 01:53:49 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program at University of North 

Carolina at Chapel Hill 

LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. 



 
 

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This transcript has been reviewed by Elizabeth Bartholet, the Southern Oral History Program, 

and LDF. It has been lightly edited, in consultation with Elizabeth Bartholet, for readability and 

clarity. Additions and corrections appear in both brackets and footnotes. If viewing 

corresponding video footage, please refer to this transcript for corrected information.    

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

Susie Penman: This is Susie Penman from the Southern Oral History Program at the 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is April 10th, 2024, and I'm here in 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Elizabeth Bartholet in her home to conduct an interview for 

the LDF Oral History Project. Thank you very much for being here and for talking with us.  

Elizabeth Bartholet: A pleasure. 

SP: So, to begin with, can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about 

where you grew up?  

EB: I’m Elizabeth Bartholet and I grew up in Manhattan, New York City. 

SP: And you were born in New York in September 1940. Can you describe the New 

York of your childhood for us? 

EB: Well, I grew up on 98th Street and Fifth Avenue, next to Central Park, which 

was a really interesting area to live in. It was kind of the edge of a privileged New York of 

these fancy apartment buildings lining Fifth Avenue. And at the same time, from 98th Street 

north, it was solid Black and Puerto Rican New York, and actually quite poor. So, there was 

this sort of privilege juxtaposed immediately with really impoverished and also, you know, 

Black, Puerto Rican New York and a lot of racial hostility at the time so that, as a little 

blonde, white girl growing up in New York, if you got off the Madison Avenue bus which 

went north, one stop too far, which as a spacey child I often did, I would find myself in a 

really scary, scary place that, suddenly within two blocks it was solidly Black, Puerto Rican, 

an area in a period where that just wasn’t safe for a little white girl to be in. [00:02:07] 

SP: And if you can, can you talk a little bit about how that impacted your 

understanding of, of the world around you, when you were that young? 



 
 

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EB: I don’t know exactly how it impacted my understanding of the world. It 

certainly was a contrast. So, one of the things I contrast it to was my experience when I first 

went South to do civil rights work, which was the summer of 1963, when I was at law 

school. So, I grew up in New York City, white girl, feeling very protected by the police and 

feeling fearful of being, as I said, getting off the bus a stop too late and being in a solidly 

Black and Puerto Rican New York. I grew up next to Central Park, endlessly reading and 

hearing stories about people being killed in the park, and we grew up with the rule being 

that we could never, ever go into the park at night and even during the daytime that you’d 

sort of watch what you were doing. My brothers, who went to a privileged private school 

right next to us, Saint Bernard’s School, would go to the park to play baseball, and regularly 

there would be groups of kids that would come from the northern, less privileged space right 

next to us and ask to play with them. But then it would turn into a fight, or they would take 

the equipment and run away. There were fights up and down the back of our apartment 

building between these kids who would come up to my brothers and their baseball group. 

[00:04:03] When I went South, and I can talk more about this later, but as a law student, my 

first summer at Harvard Law School, I went down to Jackson, Mississippi, to work for the 

one civil rights lawyer who was doing, well, any real civil rights work in Mississippi at the 

time, Bill Higgs. There were some local Black lawyers who were getting people out of jail 

on bond. But Bill Higgs was really the only active civil rights lawyer and the first night I 

was in Jackson, after we went down there for this summer job, I was in a church and except 

for the five of us, who were white law students who’d come down for the summer, 

everybody in the church was Black. And it was a real kind of moment of, oh my God. You 

know, I grew up being afraid when I was in the Black parts of New York, safe when I was in 



 
 

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the white parts of New York, and here’s this flipped reality. I’m safe in this church that’s all 

Black people, except for us. And by the end of the summer, when I came back to 

Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first day I was back here I’m walking through Harvard 

Square and a police car came by and I shrank against the wall. I grew up with the police as 

my friends, protecting me. And after a brief, I don’t think I was there for more than six, eight 

weeks that summer in Jackson, the police were the enemy. So, yeah, it was formative. But 

life changes, and my experience changed. 

SP: I want to just make a note. I want to talk about Bill Higgs later, and I would love 

to ask you more about that, but we’ll continue now with your childhood a little bit. Can you 

tell us a little bit about your family, the community around you? 

EB: I had a very conservative family, actually, so that I don’t think I may fit a 

standard history where, you know, you might expect, given what I ended up doing, that I 

had this liberal family and that we all talked about changing the world. [00:06:10] But no, 

my family was conservative, Republican. For some reason I remember that when Franklin 

Delano Roosevelt died, I was told that people cheered in the elevators in Wall Street, which 

was a very strange story, but my father worked on Wall Street. He was in the money world, I 

guess Fidelity, early stages of Fidelity funds and investment banking. And there was a 

period of time – my father was an immigrant, from Switzerland, but became very swiftly 

very successful – and there was certainly a period of time when my parents were well off. 

And, you know, I wasn’t conscious as a youngster of politics because we really didn’t talk 

about it. I just absorbed their world. I just remember a moment of awakening at school 

when, I can’t remember what grade it was, but probably fourth or fifth. And we were 

studying Roosevelt. And at a certain point the teacher said, “Well, tomorrow we’re going to 



 
 

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move on to such and such.” And I raised my hand and said, “Well, but what about the bad 

part?” Because all my life I’d heard that Roosevelt was a terrible man and had done these 

terrible things. And at school I’m studying and everything I heard and read, it seemed really 

quite wonderful to me. So that was an early moment of realizing that, oh, my family came 

from some political world that was just different from the way I was beginning to 

understand and experience the world. [00:08:06] 

SP: And sort of connecting that to the schools you went to. You went to the Chapin 

School in New York, and then you went to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut. Can you tell us 

about those schools? And I’m interested in how those experiences continued to shape, you 

know, what you would go on to do later.  

EB: Right. Well, you do smoke those out, because I don’t put them on my CV and 

you know, I’ve come to terms with having gone to them and I’ll go back to reunions and I 

have some friends from those schools, but I very much think of them as in my past and as 

something that I moved on from. So, Chapin was, I believe, all white. I don’t know if there 

was a single girl of color during the time I was at Chapin. I was there from second grade 

through eighth – through ninth grade. And I remember there was one Jewish girl in our 

class. There was a Jewish head of school, which is equivalent for Chapin of president of the 

student body when I was there. But was thought of as very unusual and amazing. And she 

must have been an amazing girl. So very white, very WASP. And Farmington was all white. 

I was politically conscious enough at Farmington that with some other girls, we went to the 

headmaster when I was at Farmington – which is what we called it, not Miss Porter’s. And I 

remember we went to, Hollis French was his name, who was the head of school, which is 

equivalent to the principal, and raised with him the idea of shouldn’t Farmington admit 



 
 

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some Black girls. [00:10:01] I was there between [19]55 and [19]58 so that probably would 

have been [19]56 or [19]57. And to this day, I remember his answer because it was such, it 

was so horrifying to me. His answer was, “We want to wait and see what the other schools 

do and see how it goes.” I thought at least he could have been a principled segregationist. 

[laughter] And then, you know, it’s on principle we’re doing this. But no, there was this 

timidity and fear and, you know, “We'll just watch and see this revolutionary thing some 

other schools might do.” So I didn't have, really, much of any respect for Farmington. 

Chapin, the headmistress seemed a more principled woman in some way. And it was just 

part of the era that a privileged school like that was doing that. There were other interesting 

things going on in terms of women and girls and the kind of education that we got. Her 

name was Ethel Stringfellow, our principal. She used to say to us [girls, since it was an all-

girls school]: “Be conspicuous by being inconspicuous.” Sort of, you’re going to, you know, 

obviously be the background. I mean, you know, she didn’t spell it out, but it’s obvious what 

that meant, that you’re not going to push yourself out there. You're going to probably be the 

background person to some man. [00:12:01] So that was the nature of the two schools I 

guess, racially and in, in terms of gender issues. 

SP: Do you remember at all. and I know this is, this is a asking a question from a 

while ago, but, after you heard back from that, the president about integrating the schools, 

do you remember at all talking to your peers about it? 

EB:  All that happened was in the meeting. I think it was instinctively we knew right 

away he wasn’t going to do this, he’d just wait and see. We didn’t push it beyond that. And I 

don't remember how large a group of us there were that were interested in those issues. 



 
 

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SP: So, you took this education, you went to Radcliffe after that. Tell us about 

Radcliffe and what drew you there. And what that environment was like compared to these, 

these two schools that you’d gone to. 

EB: Radcliffe was thrilling. So, I definitely applied quite consciously to Radcliffe. I 

had only the fuzziest sense of what I wanted to do in this world, but it definitely had to do 

with not just being the girl brought up to be conspicuous by being inconspicuous, and I 

wanted, I always was interested from the time I began to think about work, which was 

probably back when I was still, well certainly when I was at Farmington, I wanted to do 

some kind of social change work. And I did want to work, even though I was rather vague 

about professional ambitions. So, I wanted to go to Radcliffe because that was the place that 

had the reputation of being intellectually ambitious and that was definitely what I wanted. 

[00:14:17] 

SP: So, you had it in your head, you were saying already by that point, you wanted 

to do some social change work, but you weren't sure what exactly that looked like. 

EB: Yes. 

SP: And this already seems like a departure from that sort of more conservative 

education and upbringing that you had had. 

EB: Yeah. I mean, I think from the time I had that FDR discovery, that my parents 

were people who thought this President that, as far as I could understand, had done 

wonderful things, they thought he was a terrible man, I think that’s when I began to 

distinguish myself from my parents politically, even though I was pretty naive politically 

because we just didn’t have those kinds of discussions in my house. 



 
 

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S: And so, can you tell us a little bit more about Radcliffe? You said it was thrilling. 

You know, your early –  

EB: It was thrilling to be in Cambridge. It was thrilling to be in a coeducational 

environment. You know, both of my prior schools were all girls. The educational 

opportunities were just amazing. So, the idea that you could take “The Human Life Cycle” 

from Erik Erikson, who wrote the book on the human life cycle.  I mean, in many ways it 

wasn’t a perfect education. I majored in English literature, so there were a lot of big lecture 

courses, but there were still phenomenal professors. I can still recite some lines of Chaucer 

because I had Bill Alford, who would recite Chaucer in our class in a way that was just 

hypnotizing. [00:16:09] Our classmates were astounding. I mean, I met right off the bat in 

my freshman year, Mark Mirsky, who was directing plays at the time. And I acted in a play 

that he directed. And he was clearly just overwhelmingly talented. There were people who 

were super smart, super [knowledgeable] – it was quite intimidating. I didn’t come with any 

great intellectual self-confidence because I had just gone to schools that didn't cultivate and 

socialize me that way, and maybe for other reasons having to do with my family upbringing.   

I was a little, more than a little intimidated by classmates, but also excited by them and by 

the professors, by also just the atmosphere of Cambridge and Boston and having all of this 

theater and music and everything offered to us. 

SP: So, you studied English Lit, and at what point did you decide you wanted to 

pursue law school? And more specifically, if you can answer, you know, being a civil rights 

lawyer. 

EB: Very late in the game that I wanted to pursue law school. I had one uncle in my 

family who was a lawyer, but he ended up being an English professor, I think at the 



 
 

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University of North Carolina. And nobody else in my family was a lawyer. I wasn’t really, 

you know, I had two older brothers, and I think they were much more brought up to be the 

achievers. And I was just going to be the blonde little girl who sat on somebody’s knee and 

then got married. So, I wasn’t brought up thinking about careers. And in the era I went to 

Radcliffe, even there, there was very little going on in the way of telling us, educating us 

about professional opportunities. [00:18:14] So, it was more thought that if you were a 

decent or a good student, you’d go on to graduate school and then to teach. So it didn’t 

occur to me to be a lawyer until late in the game, really, spring of my senior year at college. 

I thought about being a doctor. I thought about being a social worker. I thought about 

possibly going to social work school, but I felt instinctively that’s not going to lead me 

where I want to go in terms of potential influence on policy. I knew I was interested in civil 

rights, but I didn’t think about going to law school, as I say, until spring of senior year. I 

wanted to go into the Peace Corps, and I got married in the spring of senior year, and my 

husband and I were going to go into the Peace Corps. He decided that he wanted to go to 

law school instead, and I was very disappointed in that decision. And then, I probably in part 

thought about law school because he was going to law school, but I never had any interest in 

the corporate law path. And eventually, after thinking about it, realizing I didn’t want to go 

to social work school, I began to focus on the fact that law, although I was totally down on 

the path I thought my husband was going to take, which he did take, the corporate law path, 

I thought law actually might be a really good way to do the kind of civil rights, public 

interest work that I always wanted to do. [00:20:10] 

SP: And if we can be more specific there, when you’re talking about the civil rights 

and public interest work, did you have a clear idea of what that would look like for you as a 



 
 

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lawyer? Were there things that you were encountering, reading about at the time that 

particularly influenced what you wanted to do? 

EB: No, in college I was just generally aware of civil rights issues, of segregation in 

the South. But I think I was, I had more of just a vague and general sense that I wanted to 

address social injustice in some way. 

SP: So, that decision was spring of your final year at Radcliffe. Did you go, so you 

must have applied pretty quickly? And did you begin in the fall? 

EB: I applied, I was told I was too late, I couldn’t possibly get in, I might as well 

take the law boards and see if I’d ever get in. And I took the law boards on my honeymoon 

that summer in Heidelberg. And I remember that room as like, half the room was long-

haired hippies who decided they were actually going to do something with their lives other 

than wander around Europe. And the other half of the room was buzz cut military people 

who’d gotten to the end of their 20 years and were allowed to retire. And then there was me, 

and I was certainly the only woman in the room out of the hundreds of us. And that’s where 

I took my law boards. Nobody wanted me to go to law school. So my husband didn’t want 

me to go, my family didn’t want me to go, and his family didn’t want me to go. And they all 

felt that if I went to law school, and the logical place to go would be Harvard if I got in 

because that’s where he was going, I would ruin his life at the law school and ruin our 

marriage. And so, everybody was against it. [00:22:04] And anyway, I wasn’t going to get 

in. And then at the end of the summer, I got to Paris. And in those days, you got your mail at 

American Express. And [I went there and] found my law board [results], which were very 

high grades, and I found a letter from Harvard telling me I’d been admitted, and I should 

have told them a few days earlier whether I was accepting. So, I accepted and then arrived in 



 
 

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Cambridge and didn’t know if I’d been admitted because I sent in a late acceptance and 

went to the big desk in the reception area at Harvard Law School and said, “Well, did they 

let me in? Shall I go to my first class?” And that was how I went to Harvard Law School. 

So, there was a lot of, like much of most people’s lives, there was a lot of serendipity as well 

as conscious choice involved in how I ended up at law school. 

SP: How did you deal with that pushback of, oh, you, you know, “We don't think 

you should go to law school”? 

EB: Yeah. Well, I fought back, so I’m stubborn, and I insisted on going. But it, I 

definitely felt guilty about it and maybe I am going to ruin my husband’s time at the law 

school, and maybe I have to have a very quiet presence here. I think the salvation for me 

was that, once again proving myself to be a problem, I did really well, and I got on Law 

Review after the first year, and then I had to face the issue of, do I even accept Law Review 

or not? Because I'm not supposed to be here making a splash. But I am ambitious, and I do 

push back. And so, I did decide to accept Law Review. And then being on Law Review 

actually gave me a world that was mine, where I wasn’t in my husband’s face. And I could 

just be on the Law Review and have my buddies and do my work. I mean, had it been my 

choice, in those days, you got on Law Review purely by grades. And if I’d been asked to do 

which of the kind of honor groups I wanted to do – there was Legal Aid, there was Board of 

Student Advisors and there was Law Review – [00:24:23] I would have done Legal Aid. But 

you got on Law Review by grades, and I was worldly enough to know that as a woman, 

being on Law Review at Harvard would be an amazing credential. So, I did that. 

SP: There couldn’t have been many women there. 



 
 

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EB: I was the only woman on the Law Review. I think I’m the second woman in 

history to be on the Law Review. And there were only somewhere between 16 and 20 of us 

in the class of 600 or so, 620, I think, at the law school. So, yeah, there were very few 

women. 

SP: What sort of issues did that present for you? 

EB: Well. You know, on the one hand, you did stand out simply by existing and 

being a woman, and you got a lot of attention. I mean, a lot of it was very negative. And we 

accepted or didn’t particularly fight back, a level of discrimination that would just be 

horrifying to women today. So, one of my law professors in my first year, when he asked me 

questions, would only ask them in hypotheticals that had to do with knitting and sewing. 

And the class would laugh when he asked the question and I would answer rather than 

protest. I was not in the class of another professor who was famous for having Ladies Day, 

so he would never ask women questions at all until on Ladies Day, when he would have 

them all sit up in the front and only ask them questions. [00:26:08] The Dean had a so-called 

welcoming dinner for the women law students in my era that’s famous. So, this was Erwin 

Griswold. It wasn’t famous enough for us to know what was going to happen. So, he asked 

us to dinner, which was a stiff, awkward event. He didn’t allow any drinking. So, it was, you 

know, additionally stiff, no liquor to sort of soften people up. And then he sat us in a circle, 

in chairs in the living room, after dinner. And said, “I'm going to go around the circle, and I 

want each of you to tell me how you justify taking the position of a man, what you’re going 

to do with your career, to justify taking the position of a man.”  And there were clubs that 

my husband belonged to, but I couldn’t belong to. I recently went to a book party at a place 

called the Signet Society, which is this gorgeous house in Harvard Square. And I had just 



 
 

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such ambivalent feelings about being in there because [back when I was a student] my then 

husband was a member of the Signet Society, which was this lovely intellectual club, and 

men would go and have dinner. I mean, only for men, of course, a secret society. And they 

would have dinner and talk, you know, intellectual things supposedly, and have a nice time. 

And it’s a beautiful, beautiful house. But no women were allowed. There was a library that 

was only for men in Harvard Yard. That was true at college also. But the law school was a 

much more male, overwhelmingly male world when I was there as a student. [00:28:07] 

And the professors really, in their defense, I suppose, didn’t know what to make of us. And 

so, laughing at us was kind of the only thing they knew how to do. That said, I had 

professors who were absolutely wonderful. Jim Vorenberg, who became the Dean later, who 

was a law professor of mine, criminal law professor, and crim law was one of my favorite 

subjects at law school. He was always a mentor for women, I think, besides myself, but 

certainly for me. And there were other professors who were quite open to women and doing 

their best. And I wouldn’t say any of them were particularly hostile. Even when, you know, I 

was told by one of my professors that another of them didn’t know what to do about 

grading, because he had a woman in his class who had done better than her husband on the 

exam. And my friend, the law professor who [was being appealed to], said, “What do you 

mean you don’t know what to do? I mean, of course you ought to give them the grades they 

earned.” But, you know, I think that law professor questioning whether he should give me 

the grade I earned, was no doubt thinking about saving my marriage [or some such]. You 

know, I mean, it was just a different era. And I think – I often asked, and she asked me, 

Elizabeth Holtzman, who you may know by reputation, was really tough, went on to become 

a tough district attorney in Brooklyn. And she was on the Watergate Committee when she 



 
 

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was serving in Congress. [00:30:03] And she and I will ask each other at reunions, because 

we were in the same class at law school, “Why did we take it?” And I think partly it was the 

era, and law school was less bad than the rest of the world. So, when I went to apply for 

jobs, even though I graduated in 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed and 

was in effect, judges and prosecutors were among the most discriminatory of the potential 

employers out there. So, Harvard Law School, in fact, did give us the grades we earned, did 

let me be on Law Review, did give me a phenomenal credential. And I think that I was 

conscious of all of that when I was there, that I was really lucky to be there, and I was 

getting something that would enable me to have a career that, but for that credential, I 

couldn’t have. 

SP: So, you started at Harvard Law in the fall of [19]62, and then you’ve just told us 

that in the summer of [19]63, you went down to Jackson, Mississippi, to do some civil rights 

work, and that was your first time down South. 

EB: Right. 

SP: Can you tell us about that summer, what brought you down there, how you got 

involved? 

EB: Yeah, that was an amazing summer. There was this white civil rights lawyer, 

Bill Higgs, who came to Harvard Law School my first year there, and my husband and I 

somehow heard about him, became aware, talked to him, and accepted the job he offered, 

which was for 50 dollars a month we could go down and work for him in Jackson. And that 

just seemed really exciting to both of us. And we accepted and there were three students 

from Columbia, also white, who were going to go down with us. And then before we got 

down there, he was charged with a sexual offense involving a minor. I think the technical 



 
 

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offense was corrupting a minor or something like that. [00:32:20] And all we understood 

was that it was some kind of sexual offense he was charged with, and that he made the 

decision to leave Mississippi because he basically knew that if he went to jail in Mississippi, 

he would be killed, as the only white lawyer or really only lawyer doing, active affirmative 

civil rights work in Mississippi at the time. So, we made the decision to go down anyway, as 

did the three Columbia students, and then had to sort of figure out what to do and how to try 

to be useful. 

SP: I’d be interested to hear, if you can remember, your very first impressions of 

going down South for the first time.  

EB: Well, my then mother-in-law was from Virginia, and I remember when my then 

husband and I were telling [his parents] that we were going to go and work in Mississippi 

for the summer, she said, “Oh, things aren’t” – and I think she actually used the phrase 

“Black and white,” – “they’re not as Black and white as you’re expecting,” or something, as 

if, you know, it’s going to be more subtle and complicated. And as we’re driving South and 

we get into, I think it was before Mississippi, we saw our first water fountains that said 

“colored only,” “white only.” And I have to say, that was the beginning of a summer where it 

was more extreme than I expected. And nothing subtle, nothing subtle about it. It was an 

extraordinary summer. So, the first night that we got there, we were in a church, and it was 

preparation for some demonstration the next day. And people were singing “We Shall 

Overcome.” And as I said, it was my first experience as a white person, feeling like, “Oh, 

this is where, I guess this summer, this is where I’m going to feel safe and comfortable, in 

this all-Black setting, instead of in my white world in New York, where I’m supposed to be 

afraid in the Black settings.” [00:34:38] But it was still unnerving that first night, being five 



 
 

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white people in this huge church full of Black people. But it was also amazing to be part of 

this event with this crowd singing “We Shall Overcome,” getting ready for whatever they 

were going to do the next day. Then there was trying to figure out what we were going to do 

because we didn’t have Bill there and it wasn’t like he was sending us instructions. So, we 

were kind of connecting with the local Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC 

kids, and others involved in protest. Somehow, I figured out the first of my long career of 

hopeless uphill jobs – working with Blacks who wanted to register to vote, trying to help 

them get prepared to take the constitutional interpretation test. Now, this constitutional 

interpretation test had been created in order for them to fail. It was put into effect so that the 

registrars in the South would have this nice subjective way of saying “no” to people. And I 

was trying to help people who were relatively illiterate or had limited literacy prepare for a 

test that hopefully some of them maybe did pass. Who knows? [00:36:01] Anyway that was 

what I did pretty much on a daily basis. I would go off in my car, I guess usually at night, 

with my voting literature. And I remember, once again in terms of this transformation of 

what my identity was, I remember going up to this church carrying my bundle of voting 

stuff in my arms, and it was at night, and I opened the door and there were all white people 

in there, and my heart started to pound. And I shut the door and I ran back to the car. So, you 

knew you were living on the edge of danger. I mean, we were in Jackson, and only later did 

we learn that our house was actually monitored by the White Citizens Council. At the time, 

we felt relatively anonymous and we weren’t really afraid. We would laugh at the idea that 

when we’d hear strange sounds on the phone lines, our phones were being tapped, and 

maybe we were doing something useful just by taking up the police time. But there was still 

this edge of fear, and I was literally terrified when I realized this was a white church and I 



 
 

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had this voting stuff in my arms, and I ran to the car, and I got in and I drove off looking for 

the correct church. And Jackson was integrated or segregated in a weird way, where there 

were little patches of Black and white around. And so, I finally found another church that 

seemed to be on the right corner. And this time I got out of the car, really carefully crept up 

to a window of the church, and looked in, and there were all Black people, and I was just 

like, you know, my people. I’m okay. And I opened the door and went in. Black people were 

so kind and appreciative, whether or not we were doing anything very useful. The fact that 

we were trying was something I think that they found amazing and wonderful, given how, 

for the most part, they’d been treated by white people all their lives. [00:38:08] And that was 

inspiring, just to be with people who were struggling with everything they were struggling 

with, and were appreciative that we were trying to help. I'm not sure what else to talk about 

from the summer except that it, I’m sure, fit into my commitment for the rest of my career to 

keep doing things where we were at least trying to do meaningful work that was helping 

people. 

SP: Well, that was sort of answering my next question, which is, how did that 

summer affect your two remaining years in law school and your trajectory after that? 

EB: I mean, I think I went to law school pretty determined to do some form of civil 

rights public interest work. So, in that sense, I don’t think it was revelatory or changed my 

trajectory. It probably just helped convince me that that was the right trajectory. And being 

at Harvard Law School, it was important to get that kind of inspiration. I think it still is 

today. And I noticed all the years I was teaching, it’s a very powerfully corporate oriented 

environment, so it can easily corrupt the students who come there thinking they know what 

they want to do, and that it is a positive social justice thing. But you can get corrupted by 



 
 

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being in this atmosphere where corporate law firms are on the campus and offering jobs, and 

where even some of my favorite professors were telling me, “Oh, you really should go work 

for a corporate law firm. That’s where you’ll get good training. Those other jobs are less 

interesting intellectually.” [00:40:01] I mean, stuff that is garbage, actually, if you know the 

public interest world, where I think it’s the most challenging work that there is to try to 

figure out how to use law to leverage power for disempowered people. But there’s a myth 

widely shared among faculty at Harvard Law School then, and I think still now, that the 

more important intellectual work or more powerfully intellectual work is being done at these 

corporate law firms. 

SP: I’m going to ask about that later, because that seems to have very much affected 

your teaching. 

EB: It did. 

SP: But for now, I want to, I want to ask about post law school, just a quick 

question. It says from [19]66 to [19]67, you were staff council on the President’s 

Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in D.C. Can you tell us a 

little bit about that? Because that would have been right before you joined LDF. 

EB: Right. So, I clerked for the first year out of law school. And just again, sign of 

the times. I clerked for a wonderful judge, Henry Edgerton. But he was really almost the 

only federal judge who would hire a woman clerk. And he was on the D.C. Circuit, which 

was a great circuit to be on, had really interesting cases. And then I worked for the National 

Crime Commission, which is what we called it. Jim Vorenberg was the executive director of 

the commission. So, I worked as a special assistant for Jim Vorenberg. And that was a 

fabulous job. Really introduced me to a lot of what goes on in Washington, D.C. and 



 
 

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government. And I also wrote a chapter that was the foundation for my Legal Action Center 

work later. So, I was asked at a certain point – I did a lot of different things for the 

commission, but one of the things I did was to write a chapter for the Corrections Task 

Force. [00:42:03] And I was asked to do something on prisoner rights. And I discovered this 

issue of what was then called civil disabilities, that had to do with the fact that prisoners get 

out of prison and then find it enormously difficult to find jobs. At the time, there were 

automatic disqualifications for all kinds of licenses, often for the very licenses they’d been 

trained for in prison. So, in prison, a classic thing was to train people to be barbers. But you 

get out, try to get a barber’s license, and you can’t because of your conviction record. So, 

that struck me as totally insane. And I wrote a chapter talking about the various kinds of 

civil disabilities that people face when they get out of prison or got out of prison at the time. 

And, yeah, I also discovered with that job the way commissions work, is that staff write 

chapters and then the commission members approve them or they might ask for certain 

kinds of revisions. But the commission approved that chapter that I wrote without revisions, 

and it became part of the commission report. 

SP: And that went on to help you with –  

EB: Yeah, I mean, we can talk about it later. But when I started the Legal Action 

Center, I decided to focus on the issues that people with prison, but also just conviction 

records face in terms of employment and other opportunities like voting. 

SP: And then LDF. Can you talk about first hearing about LDF and the sort of work 

that it was doing? 

EB: So, I must have known about LDF all the way through law school. It was the 

leading civil rights law organization in the country. [00:44:02] So, it’s an entity that I’d 



 
 

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always heard about, respected, thought I might want to work there eventually, if at all 

possible. Also knew that it was really, really difficult to get jobs there, because [there was a] 

very, very limited turnover of staff, because [they were] just super desirable jobs. So, I, after 

the crime commission I stayed in D.C. for another [few] months, and then moved back to 

New York City and decided to apply to LDF, and I think I got my, I know I got my foot in 

the interview door because Jim Vorenberg knew Jack Greenberg and recommended me. And 

they were very close colleagues and friends. And so, I got an interview and then they gave 

me a job. 

SP: Do you remember the interview? 

EB: No. 

SP: Was it Jack Greenberg? 

EB: I do not remember who I interviewed with. 

SP: What about some of your earliest, you know, weeks, months there? Can you talk 

about settling in, figuring out what exactly you were going to be doing? 

EB: The early significant experience that I remember was my first legal work that I 

was assigned, which was to turn a brief in the Maxwell against Bishop death penalty case 

[into a petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court]. The case had been lost in the 

Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. The challenge to the death penalty in this case involved a 

racial [discrimination theory]. I was given the assignment of taking the brief that LDF filed 

in the Eighth Circuit and turning it into the cert petition for the Supreme Court. [00:46:07] 

And that was just one of the formative amazing training experiences in my life, because 

Tony Amsterdam was the mastermind of the death penalty campaign, and he basically 

designed the litigation strategy. And I don’t know for a fact that he wrote that [Eighth 



 
 

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Circuit] brief, but he would have designed the strategy and done earlier briefs that resulted 

in [that] brief. And I learned from that what a really good brief in a case where you’re 

challenging law that is, and trying to create a different law for the future, what it looks like 

and how you have to amass the social science evidence and how you create persuasive 

arguments. You know, part of what I had wanted to do with the Legal Defense Fund from 

the get-go was to work on death penalty cases. And part of that was I wanted to work with 

Tony Amsterdam. He was a legend already. A legend that I knew about already from the 

time I started at LDF, and I wanted the opportunity to work with him. He was running the 

death penalty campaign. I wanted to work on death cases. Partly, I had always been against 

the death penalty, as far as I could remember, at least. And I also just wanted that lawyering 

opportunity [to work with Tony]. So that that was my first and really quite extraordinary 

experience. And I would say for the rest of my litigating career, I was applying some of 

what I learned in that first experience. 

SP: And you mind telling us a little bit about that case? I mean, that was capital 

punishment. It was in Arkansas, if I’m correct. [00:48:01] And then it has to do with the 

discriminatory pattern by which Black defendants were sentenced to death. 

EB: Right. Part of what the campaign was about was coming up with theories that, if 

accepted, would knock out the death penalty across the board throughout the United States. 

And then another part of the campaign had to do with keeping everybody on death row 

alive, and that was partly to keep them alive, because LDF was committed against the death 

penalty. But also, strategically, it was to build up the number of people on death row so that 

when the Supreme Court had to deal with one of these law-changing cases, they would 

know that if they upheld the death penalty, they were effectively executing not just one, but 



 
 

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hundreds of people. All the people on death row who had been waiting for the resolution of 

that case. So, one of those major cases was Maxwell, and it was based on the idea that the 

death penalty was racially discriminatory in its application. And there was very sophisticated 

statistical evidence that even if you take into account other factors that might have resulted 

in the death penalty, that race was still the primary explanation for why people ended up on 

death row. And there was very good statistical evidence, and we had a powerful case and 

lost it in the Supreme Court. 

SP: What did that loss mean to you at the time? And what did it tell you about, you 

know, how the system worked and how you might continue to work within it and fight 

against it? 

EB: I honestly don’t remember particularly at the time, but I think my experience 

over the years, and I’m sure this was part of what I experienced at the time, is that you don’t 

take a defeat as defeat. [00:50:17] You take it as, so now, what’s the next step? What do we 

do next to beat the system, to change the system? And if that theory doesn’t work, then we 

come up with another theory. So, the next theory essentially was the Furman arbitrariness 

theory, the next major theory. 

SP: So, you did this, this death penalty case work. You said, first, this is the earliest 

thing. You’re sort of just launched into it. But you also did, I mean, you did a variety of 

cases, obviously, you worked on school desegregation, draft deferment. How did you 

balance the, the caseload, the various issues that you’re working with that are all very 

different? 

EB: So, I wanted, I really chose to and happily they let me, have a varied set of 

cases. A lot of people I knew specialized. They were employment lawyers with the LDF, or 



 
 

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they were school desegregation lawyers. And I wanted to work on different cases in 

different areas. So, I definitely wanted to do death penalty work, but I didn’t want that to be 

a hundred percent of what I did. And that’s what I got to do. It was not so much a question 

of balance. Usually there’d be some big case. You were writing a Supreme Court brief, so 

you just focused on that. And then you moved on to the next case, the next area. 

SP: And I want to make sure that that we do talk about a couple of specific cases. 

Clay v. United States. I would love to hear more about that. Can you begin by laying out the 

issue at the heart of it? [00:52:01] 

EB: So, the man we came to call Muhmmad Ali later, refused to step forward for the 

draft. He was drafted. He refused. He was convicted. He raised a religious objection. He 

lost. And we raised that issue in the Supreme Court. So that was the case I worked on. And I 

worked with another lawyer. The two of us were mainly the lawyers working on the brief in 

the Supreme Court for the man then known as Clay. 

SP: And who was the other lawyer? 

EB: I’m pretty sure that that was Jonathan Shapiro. I worked with different lawyers 

on different things, and I’m pretty sure it was Jonathan and I that worked on that case. 

SP: And what was it like to work on a case with someone who was so just nationally, 

I mean, so famous. 

EB: Well, for the most part, when you’re working on the Supreme Court level, you 

don’t really work with the client at all. The great blessing of this particular case is that 

Muhammad Ali came to the Legal Defense Fund office after we had won the case. And he 

sat, LDF had this long row of secretary tables at the time, and I remember Muhammad Ali 

sat on a desk at one end of that long row and all of us staff were out there and thrilled, and 



 
 

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he handed me two tickets to what was then known as the Great Fight, which was his 

upcoming fight with Frazier. So, he’d [had his boxing license] reinstated and was able to 

fight. And I got to go to what’s the only boxing match of my life, since boxing is not really 

my favorite sport. Indeed, I hate boxing. But I went to that match and that was pretty 

amazing. 

SP: What were they, like, front row? 

EB: They were not front row, but it was an astounding scene. [00:54:02] I remember 

going down in the subway and it was packed with people in long ermine coats. And the 

crowd was amazing. And what was really stunning to me at the time was it was a very 

hostile-to-Ali crowd. A lot of middle-class Blacks at the time did not like Ali in the way he 

taunted Frazier and a lot of others. And there was a lot of screaming from the crowds saying, 

“Kill him, kill him,” urging Frazier to go after. [phone dings] I'm sorry. I’m just going to 

take a quick break and answer this. 

SP: So, you went to that fight which is an incredible – 

EB: The fight was amazing. Discovering the crowd so hostile to Ali was surprising. 

And it was a great privilege to get to work on those kinds of cases at LDF. I mean, most of 

what I did at the Legal Defense Fund was Supreme Court litigation, which would be many 

lawyers’ dream. My first ever oral argument was in the U.S. Supreme Court, which is 

ridiculous. I mean, I had argued one tiny motion in the lowest of low New York courts 

before I argued a Supreme Court case. That was the Father Groppi case. So, working at 

Legal Defense Fund was an amazing dream job. It definitely was what I wanted from the 

time I got out of law school. I think I fantasized about eventually working for LDF. I really 

feel privileged I got to work there. And I look back thinking, it’s kind of amazing I actually 



 
 

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decided to leave it and move on. But it was an astounding place. And, yeah, I also worked 

on a couple of cases involving the Black Panthers. The most interesting, the one that 

involved the most work involved Bobby Seale, who actually I saw recently. [00:56:14] He 

came up here a few years ago to give a talk, and I went to his talk and reintroduced myself 

to him. And that [case] grew out of the Democratic Convention, [1968], where various 

lefties were accused of fomenting riots. And Seale was really completely innocent of that. 

And then Seale asked for a delay in the trial so that he could be represented by the only 

lawyer he really trusted, who, oddly enough, was a white guy called Charles Gary. And the 

judge was a nutcase. Hoffman. Turned him down. And then Seale wanted to represent 

himself. And every time Seale tried to represent himself in court, Hoffman slapped him with 

a six-month contempt sentence. By the end of the trial, Bobby Seale was bound to a chair 

and gagged in the courtroom. And we represented Seale on the appeal of what ended up 

being a four-year contempt sentence for which he’d had no jury, which was outrageous. And 

part of the wonder of that case, other than the interest of the whole thing, was that for the 

appeal, we decided that the best combination for the oral argument would be Tony 

Amsterdam, who’s the best you can get for anything, and Charles Gary, because 

symbolically, it seemed important for Bobby Seale to have the lawyer that he’d been trying 

to get for trial on appeal. And so, we arranged to have the appeal argument split between 

Tony Amsterdam and Charles Gary. And out in Chicago the night before the oral argument, I 

was doing this work for Tony getting these cases last minute. [00:58:13] What he, you know, 

would want that we hadn’t already briefed and then there was going to be a meeting with 

Tony and Charles Gary. And I would have thought, in my neurotic super prep way, that, you 

know, a week before we would have figured who was going to give which part of the 



 
 

27 
 

argument, and then you can prepare. And Tony was apparently completely relaxed about the 

fact that he had no idea what Charles wanted to say. And he, Tony, would just figure it out in 

this meeting. And then they had this meeting the night before the argument. And Charles just 

wanted to tell stories about this and that. And the whole meeting went that way with stories. 

And then the next day comes the argument. They had no discussion whatsoever, except that 

Charles would go first and then Tony would go. And so, Charles gets up and gives half the 

argument, and Tony got up and seamlessly started as if they’d completely worked out the 

outline and gave a brilliant argument, filling in all the kinds of things that Charles had not 

talked about. So, that was that. But the Black Panther – I think another thing about the 

Panther work that’s interesting is in that era, there were a lot of interesting tensions. There 

was the white man, Jack Greenberg, running Legal Defense Fund in an era where that was 

becoming increasingly difficult. and there was also the issue of is the Legal Defense Fund, 

which has represented people like Martin Luther King, going to represent this revolutionary 

Black power, Black Panther group. [00:59:57] So there were decisions not to represent 

Angela Davis, which led to one of our staff members leaving. Margaret Burnham left at the 

time to go work with Angela Davis. But at the same time, we did decide to represent Ali, 

and we represented some Black Panthers. And I’m really not sure of what the thinking was 

behind that. So, one of the things about Legal Defense Fund is that I think brilliant as Jack 

Greenberg was, amazing as was the work that LDF did to lead the legal movement, really to 

develop civil rights law, we didn’t have much discussion about it. You know, our staff 

meetings were not amazing brainstorming, revelatory events. We had them relatively 

regularly, but we didn’t really talk through the astounding strategies that were being 

developed. I mean, I think they were talked through individually in smaller groups. 



 
 

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SP: But with knowing that, can you recall the feeling among your peers at LDF, any 

feeling about, tension post the Angela Davis decision or a feeling of like, oh, this is so great. 

We're representing Seale, you know, that that kind of thing. 

EB: I think there was some resentment that we didn’t represent Angela Davis. I – the 

only tension I remember about the Black Panther cases was I remember a Black member of 

our legal staff screaming at me when I asked him a question about one of the Panther cases I 

was working on. And I suspect that that may have had to do with resentment that I, a white 

person, was working on that case, although I never knew. [01:02:05] I just, I was 

dumbfounded at this hostility, and that’s the only way I can explain it. So, I think there may 

have been some tensions, but I think that, you know, it was a big staff and there were groups 

of us that were friends within it, and I don’t, I do not remember us discussing, you know, 

“Should we take on the Black Panthers or not?” 

SP: It’s a, it was a really interesting time to be representing, you know, the Panthers. 

Can you talk a little bit about the dynamics of doing that work at that particular moment in 

history? Did it, you know, of course you’re in it, but did it feel politically charged? 

EB: It felt politically charged. I think there is something about when you’re in the 

middle of it that you don’t really understand the place in history all these things have. So 

when I watched, years later, when I was teaching actually, Eyes on the Prize, the astounding 

documentary of the civil rights period, I was amazed that I had been involved in work 

related to, I think every single episode of Eyes on the Prize or almost every episode. It was 

amazing how historic so much of what I worked on in this brief five years was. But I didn’t 

really get it at the time. I mean, I had only a sense of Ali’s place in history, what it meant for 

him to refuse the draft. I didn’t even understand what it meant for him in terms of his career 



 
 

29 
 

to give up, in his peak career as a boxer, several years, and it could have been forever, for 

his religion, which it truly was. So, I feel I’ve only really come to understand in retrospect 

the significance of what we were working on. [01:04:13] 

SP: I want to ask you a couple of questions before we get to another specific case, 

similar to your experiences in education, you, I imagine, were one of the few women 

working at LDF at the time. 

EB: Yes. I was one of the few women. There just were not that many women 

lawyers at that point. 

SP: Can you talk about any particular challenges that presented, or even if it did 

present too many challenges? 

EB: I think I was just used to the fact from the time I went to Harvard Law School 

that I was a woman in a man’s world, and it didn’t particularly bother me. I think it was only 

actually when I came to join [the Faculty at] Harvard Law School that I began to feel the 

disadvantage of being a woman in a uniquely male environment. But I wasn’t conscious of 

that as a problem [so much as a student or young lawyer]. I think I was more just thrilled 

that I made it into that world. 

SP: And sort of on the same topic, can you just talk about how, describe the 

community of attorneys at LDF, like how you all worked together? You would work so, it 

seems, intensively on these cases for periods of time. Can you describe that intellectual, 

social, workplace, community? 

EB: Well, I’ve been very conscious since I’ve been teaching at Harvard Law School 

of the privilege of working at a place like Legal Defense Fund or Legal Action Center, 

which I founded and ran later. Or frankly, my job also with the Crime Commission. I mean, 



 
 

30 
 

everything I’ve done except teaching, I guess I felt like we’re part of a team and we’re on 

the same side and we’re fighting others out there, and that’s a wonderful feeling. [01:06:11] 

And if there was competition, it was pretty muted. You mostly wanted to help the people 

you were working with give better oral arguments, do better work. And you were thrilled 

with victories and celebrated them together. And that was the feeling. And it’s a great 

feeling. 

SP: How would you all celebrate? 

EB: I guess we’d go out and have dinners. I mean, Legal Action Center, I remember 

more because we would all celebrate as a whole, you know, legal staff, as well as secretaries 

would all have a lunch or a party. 

SP: Okay. I want to talk about Chance v. Board of Education. Can you, as you’ve 

done for us before, sort of lay out the issues? 

EB: So, that was a really formative case for me. Somebody came to the Legal 

Defense Fund and wanted us to help with school decentralization. And school 

decentralization was tied to the whole Black Power idea. It was like, “Oh, well, if we can 

decentralize the schools, then local [Black] communities can run their schools more.” So I 

got that, and that all made sense to me at the time. And I was prepared to step forward and 

say, “Yeah, I’ll help with this school decentralization case.” And there was some principal 

called Boston Chance who was an acting principal [denied the right to become a permanent 

principal because he failed the centralized civil service exam]. I can’t remember who came 

to us pushing the school decentralization cause. [01:08:02] And I can’t remember any 

conscious decision being made by the Legal Defense Fund about how invested it wanted to 

be. But it seemed like somebody on high at LDF had made the decision that, yeah, we 



 
 

31 
 

would do something to promote school decentralization. So, I took on this case and it was 

the first time I’d taken on something that wasn’t on the Supreme Court level, that was, “Oh, 

we need to bring a case.” And that's when I realized how simple Supreme Court litigation 

was and how unbelievably challenging it was, particularly for somebody who’d never been 

trained at Harvard Law School to do anything other than Supreme Court litigation, to do 

stuff on the trial level. So, I put together this case, and we filed a complaint on behalf of 

acting principals who failed the test to become a permanent principal. And we structured it 

as an employment discrimination case, which it was. There were only, there were no Black 

principals in the entire New York City school system with overwhelming majority Black 

kids in it. And no Black assistant principals either. And we brought this case on behalf of 

acting assistant and acting principals challenging the licensing system [as discriminatory]. d 

So, on one level, it was an employment discrimination case. But the idea was that if we 

could knock out these exams, then maybe we could somehow, and nobody had really 

thought through how, get local control over the decision making as to who would be the 

principal and the assistant principal. So, that was the goal. And then I brought this case. We 

tried the case, and this was my first experience trying a case, which I was woefully 

unprepared to do. [01:10:11] My first witness ever was a statistician that I had to examine 

and cross-examine, and I’d never taken statistics. I had a lot of help from people at 

Columbia Law School, a statistical expert and an employment discrimination expert who 

helped advise me. I was so naive about trying a case that I remember the night before, trying 

to prepare my notes for examining the witness, thinking, how do I even start? Do I say, 

“Who are you?” I had never even watched those TV trial programs. But somehow, I 

managed to win this highly sophisticated statistical racial case on the trial level. And then 



 
 

32 
 

we took it up on appeal and won it. And then I hung in there for years and years and years, 

and we managed to get local control because we knocked out the licensing system, and we 

somehow structured a system where the local boards selected principals. I realized then how 

challenging it was to take a social problem, figure out what litigation might help solve it, but 

then also do all the follow through that would make the litigation meaningful. Because we 

could have won. We had a New York Daily News entire front cover saying that we’d won 

when we knocked out the exams, and nothing would have happened different if I hadn’t 

spent the next five to eight years hanging in there, thinking about how to make the [court-

ordered] relief give us the relief we actually wanted, which was a form of decentralization, 

at least temporarily. So that was an astounding education in terms of what I saw as the more 

challenging work out there. And that’s really what led me to leave the Legal Defense Fund. 

[01:12:13] As I say, looking back, I often think I can’t believe I left this dream job, where I 

got to do all this wonderful Supreme Court stuff. But somehow, at the time, I was idealistic 

enough to feel like I should do the more important work. And the easy work was really 

Supreme Court litigation. All the issues are formed and they’re handed to you. Of course 

there certainly were Legal Defense Fund lawyers who were doing that formative work. 

That’s just not what I was doing. At the central office, in New York City, I was just doing the 

Supreme Court stuff. And I thought I wanted to do the more challenging work. And I also 

thought at least the New York office was too focused on litigation and on Supreme Court 

litigation, and that I really wanted to start something that would be thinking, how do we 

solve the social problem? And is it litigation or is it legislation? Or is it maybe educating, 

socializing certain people to operate differently? What does it take to change things? So, I 

decided to start a new public interest law firm and I decided it should be focused on a 



 
 

33 
 

relatively narrow social problem, because that’s the only way you’re going to really 

understand the problem and get sophisticated about what would change it. And that was the 

essence of the idea of Legal Action Center. And then when I thought about what social 

problem, I really went back to what I’d worked on when I was at the National Crime 

Commission and thought, well, if you want to work on behalf of people who are really at 

rock bottom in society, people who have experienced prison and drug abuse and are 

struggling to recover and to make it in society are really among the most profound social 

outcasts and among those who need the most help. [01:14:12] So let’s focus on that group, 

and let’s keep the focus narrow so that we really know what we’re doing, and then figure out 

whether to help them we should be doing litigation or something else. And that was the 

formative idea with Legal Action Center. And I went to Vera Institute of Justice because 

once again, my friend and mentor and former employer, Jim Vorenberg, knew Herb Sturz 

[Vera’s Director], really well, and he had introduced me to Herb over the years. And Herb 

had offered me jobs over the years that I had not taken in earlier years. And I went to him 

and basically said, “I want to start this new entity.” And frankly, I went to him after we tried 

to kick in the doors at various foundations and gotten nowhere. And I knew that Herb was a 

genius at raising money. And I went to Herb and said, “I want to start this entity. Are you 

interested? Do you want to help?” And he said yes, and the deal was I would work for him 

for a year, in theory as counsel for the Vera Institute of Justice. And I did work sort of as 

counsel and assistant to Herb, but I also worked on starting this new entity and getting it 

funded. And that’s what I did for a year. So we, with Herb’s help, which was huge, got in the 

door at the Ford Foundation, got initial funding from Ford, founded a board, and he gave me 

ideas for many of the board members. And I had some other contacts from my Harvard 



 
 

34 
 

Visiting Committee that I’d been on and other lawyering stuff, and we put together an 

amazing board and had the funding. And then after that initial year with Vera, we started 

Legal Action Center. 

SP: And first of all, I’m just struck by how much of a pivot that seems to be. You 

know, you’ve gone from doing this work at LDF, to very much sort of like almost 

managerial, like a leadership position, doing this thing. [01:16:14] How did you handle that, 

that switch? 

EB: Yeah. It was interesting because I’d never thought of running an organization as 

something I wanted to do. Certainly, never thought of fundraising as something I wanted to 

do. And I found running the organization incredibly satisfying. So, a lot of the satisfaction 

came from trying to have a really good workplace where people were working hard, really 

committed to the work, but also getting a lot of job satisfaction out of it, which of course 

also led into them being really good at the work because they stayed at the job. So both legal 

staff and secretaries at Legal Action stayed forever. The person who is now the director and 

president of the Legal Action Center, I hired as a part time law student when I was there, and 

he's now been director for at least 25 years. There are other people, several people on the 

board, who were original staff members. Many secretaries stayed, made it their lifetime 

career. And that made them all really effective. Part of what has made Legal Action so 

effective is that it’s developed extraordinary expertise, which comes from, in part, the actual 

human beings on the staff being people who’ve often worked 20, 30 years there. And that 

was fun. I mean, it was really satisfying. I really loved trying to be a good boss, making it a 

good place to work, making it a place where, among other things, people felt happy and felt 

satisfied in the work and where it was a democratic institution where we celebrated, as 



 
 

35 
 

entire staff, victories and mourned losses. [01:18:15] And I think it was that. And I even 

found the fundraising – I always hated trying to raise money for anything else other than 

when it was my job to do for Legal Action – but I believed in the organization enough and 

discovered that [fundraising] is actually not that different from litigation. You have an 

audience, you set out to persuade them, hopefully you get the money, and you keep us 

going. And it was sort of interesting in its own right. So, you know, I'm surprised, again, 

looking back, I only stayed with that for five years, but I did end up feeling like I didn’t 

want to be raising money forever. And I didn’t want that kind of job forever. 

SP: It seems like it was so ahead of its time. There’s a more robust discourse about 

prisoner reentry now, but at the time, it seems like these issues that you were concerned with 

at, at the Legal Action Center were just not part of the national dialogue. 

EB: We were ahead of the time. Yes, I think that is really true. I think when I wrote 

about those issues for the Crime Commission, they were just essentially undiscovered. I 

think my chapter was the only thing almost, that existed for a long time in the way of any 

articles or writing on the topic. Legal Action was really alone there, and it was very hard to 

raise money because this was an unpopular, our clientele was an unpopular group. And even 

though, I mean, I always thought that reentry was a cause that we should be able to sell to 

courts as well as fundraisers because it doesn’t make sense for the larger society to be telling 

people who get out of prison, and almost all prisoners are going to get out, or telling people 

who have drug abuse problems, “You can’t have jobs and you can’t have housing.” 

[01:20:18] I mean, we’re just telling them your only choice is to do crime. And that’s not 

good for society. So, it’s something where the message should be one you can get out there. 



 
 

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At the same time, it really wasn’t out there at the time. And I do think it’s been very 

satisfying to see how many more people are committed to that idea today. 

SP: Can you talk a little bit more about that, about the evolution of this work and 

why it still is such a big issue? I mean, it’s still such a problem. 

EB: Well, the thing that discourages me – so I think there’s been a lot of progress, 

much of it made by Legal Action, which, since I left it in 1977, I can be outrageously proud 

of, because I haven’t been doing the work since 1977. I think it’s an astoundingly effective 

organization. The thing that most discourages me is that we have increasing numbers of 

people incarcerated. So, we’re still convicting people and locking them up. We’ve got a 

huge drug abuse problem. So, I do think Legal Action and finally some others have made 

things better in terms of limiting the adverse impact that having a drug history or a criminal 

history has on your job, housing, and other prospects. But it’s still not a good thing. I mean, 

even if we’ve eliminated to some degree the discrimination, people still have a harder time 

getting jobs, housing, and other opportunities in life if they have drug histories and criminal 

histories. [01:22:00] And we’ve got more of those drug histories and criminal histories. So, 

in that sense, the larger problem has only gotten worse. 

SP: What do you think, I mean, why? More people are incarcerated, of course, but as 

time has passed, why has this continued to be such an obstacle? 

EB: Well, reentry is better. So, I do think people are recognizing the irrationality of 

locking people out of opportunity who have criminal and drug histories, but it’s still going to 

take a toll on you. You know, you still may not have gone to college, university, gotten good 

job experience if you’ve been in prison. As well as there’s going to be some level of 

discrimination. So, I think the real why is, why are we a society that is incarcerating 



 
 

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increasing numbers of people, and why have we got such a horrendous drug problem that 

has largely gotten worse rather than better? And those things are things that Legal Action 

hasn’t really focused on in particular. 

SP: One of the first cases, one of the first things, that Legal Action would have 

worked on would have been Carmona v. Ward, well that was 1977. 

EB: Well, our first major case that I’m super proud of was Beazer. Beazer against 

the Transit Authority. I have a photograph upstairs if you want to take a picture before you 

leave of me in a hard hat and some of my lawyers in hard hats with the judge in a hard hat 

[all on a view of the Transit Authority during the trial] in the Beazer case. So, Beazer was 

our first law reform case, and Carmona built on it, and was an amazingly, sort of 

outrageously gutsy case, I think, given that at the time there was no law that we had to rely 

on. So, it came from my Legal Defense Fund “we can create good law” experience. 

[01:24:03] We brought that case on behalf of four named plaintiffs who worked for the City 

Transit, New York City Transit Authority, who had been heroin addicts and were on 

methadone maintenance treatment. So, they were no longer taking heroin. They were on 

[treatment] methadone. They were doing their jobs perfectly well. And when the Transit 

Authority tested them and found out they were on methadone, they fired them based on their 

no drugs policy – a no drugs policy that had developed, not with treatment drugs in mind, 

but with heroin and other illegal drugs in mind. So it was a thoughtless policy as applied to 

our plaintiffs. However, we had no law to go on to challenge it except the [federal] 

Constitution. So, we challenged this as being irrational discrimination and unconstitutional, 

given that it was governmental action by the City Transit Authority. And ended up in front of 

a judge was both a conservative and a Christian scientist, which meant he didn’t believe in 



 
 

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taking alcohol, tobacco, or certainly any of the substances that our plaintiffs had taken and 

was clearly biased against our case in the beginning. And in the end, we put on an amazing 

case where we brought on like the, all the drug treatment royalty of the New York City and 

national [worlds], to testify on behalf of methadone maintenance and how well it worked. 

And we brought on methadone maintenance program [directors], and we brought on 

employers, leading employers in New York who had hired [methadone maintained former 

addicts]. And our judge, in the end, ruled a hundred percent for us. [01:26:05] Years and 

years later, [the case] was lost in the Supreme Court. But Judge Griesa, this conservative 

Christian Scientist judge [we had at the trial level], gave us, I think it was a 56-page opinion 

in which he talked about how methadone-maintained addicts could be model employees and 

talked about methadone maintenance in a way that we were able to use on behalf of our 

constituency for years and years. And, so it was an incredible, positive case for the work we 

were trying to do and also for our reputation as a law firm. 

SP: It was groundbreaking. 

EB: It was. 

SP: And then Carmona v. Ward, you said that sort of laid the foundation for it in a 

way. 

EB: Right. 

SP: Can you lay out what Carmona v. Ward was? 

EB: Carmona was the Rockefeller drug law case. Carmona was another 

outrageously bold case. The Rockefeller drug law existed at the time in its most stringent, 

outrageous form. And we decided to challenge it. And we didn’t have much in existing law 

to go on. I can't honestly remember the theory on which we relied. I do remember getting 



 
 

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the chairman of our board, who was an incredibly respected, establishment lawyer, Arthur 

Liman, the lead litigator at the very respected Paul, Weiss law firm. He had a huge 

reputation in the public interest world as well. And he had been Chair of the Attica 

Commission, which issued a famous report on the riots up there. [01:28:02] So he had a 

huge name and was the chair of the Legal Action board. And I did get him to argue our case 

in the district court, because I felt that we needed somebody really with his reputation to 

help show that this wasn’t just a frivolous case. I believe we won in the district court and 

then lost in the Court of Appeals. But it started a conversation about the idiocy of the 

Rockefeller drug law and its horrendously punitive character, and that continued and it 

started Legal Action on the path of working in a variety of ways to change the Rockefeller 

drug law, so that by today – and Legal Action has really been very active in all stages of this 

[reform] – the Rockefeller drug law has been very, very limited in terms of its original 

draconian character. 

SP: So, you were, you were there for a few years. You joined the faculty of Harvard 

Law in 1977. 

EB: Yeah, I was with Legal Action from, well, I started with Vera, founding it in 

[19]72. So, its concept started in [19]72, [it was formed legally in 1973], and then I left in 

[19]77 and started at Harvard Law School. 

SP: How did you take the experiences, the lessons you learned at both the Legal 

Defense Fund and Legal Action to your, this newfound sort of teaching role that you had? 

EB: Well, I’d like to say it would have been easier than it was. So, it was hard. I 

mean, I think I started teaching without really knowing what I was getting into. I knew that I 

wanted a job where I could focus, I thought, more on the substance and not be worrying 



 
 

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about fundraising and lots of the minutia of administering an organization. [01:30:08] I 

didn’t realize how hard it would be to translate my activist public interest self into teaching. 

I mean, you can’t just walk into the classroom and say to your Harvard Law School 

students, “I want you to do something worthwhile in your life.” And I found teaching really 

challenging for that reason. For the first several years I wasn’t sure it was where I wanted to 

be, but I kept thinking, “There's such flexibility in this job. I ought to figure out how to 

make it fit me rather than just give up on it.” So, I stuck with it, and I’m really glad I did. 

The flexibility is astounding, particularly once you get tenure. A tenured law professorship 

enables you to do pretty much whatever you want with very few limits on your time in terms 

of specific teaching demands. So, the first thing I learned was that writing can be a really 

important advocacy tool. And that took me a while. I would say it was only when I made the 

transition to focus more on child welfare work, and I began to write in that area, that I 

realized that my writing was reaching an audience and having the potential and sometimes 

actual impact on policy in a way that [litigation] I had brought had [never] had. So, I 

realized the power of writing, and the kind of writing I’ve always done has been that kind of 

advocacy writing. And I’d say, yeah, once you realize that it’s essentially really hard to 

change the world, then writing is a powerful advocacy tool. [01:32:04] The other thing that 

took me a while to develop was forms of teaching, where I felt I could help inspire students 

to stick with the idealism that brought many of them to law school, and help them figure out 

what to do with that and what kind of jobs they might do. So, one example of that kind of 

teaching, I started a clinic/seminar called “Public Interest Law: Race and Poverty,” PILRAP 

for short. And what we did in that clinic was to assign students for the January semester, 

which was a three-and-a-half-week semester, to go work with exciting different civil rights 



 
 

41 
 

and public interest organizations around the country for three and a half weeks, then come 

back to Harvard and do a research project related to their placement. And also, in the 

seminar classroom, we would discuss their placement, their organization, its theory of social 

change, and how the work they were doing, their research project, related to social change. 

So, one example of the kind of student that I had, I mean, a pretty astounding example, but 

Bryan Stevenson took my PILRAP course. I sent him South to do the first anti-death penalty 

work he ever did. And I think Bryan would have done probably similar totally astounding 

things with his life regardless. But he does credit PILRAP for getting him started on the 

anti-death penalty track. And he also came back to the classroom and told his fellow 

students about what it was like to go and sit and talk in his job that summer with a guy on 

death row and try to help that person. [01:34:05] So, PILRAP was a way of inspiring the 

students, both through the particular placement they had, but also through engaging with 

each other’s placements and work in the context of the classroom component. And I think it 

was a really inspirational course for many of the students who took it. Another example of 

how I came to realize I could do social change work at the Harvard Law School was starting 

the Child Advocacy Program. So, 38 years ago, in 1985, I adopted the first of my two 

adopted kids. And that got me really interested in adoption, reproductive technology, child 

welfare, and related issues. And I began to teach in that area. And one of the amazing 

blessings of a tenured position at Harvard Law School is that you can change your 

trajectory. And I ended up teaching and writing almost entirely in that area, which is what 

I’ve done for the past about 35 years. And for the last 15 years or so of my teaching career, I 

started and then ran the Child Advocacy Program [CAP]. [CAP] had a number of courses. 

One of them was called the Art of Social Change and was a course focused on child welfare 



 
 

42 
 

issues, what had come to be my favorite substantive issues. But it also was all about how to 

do social change work. So we brought into the classroom, 12 successive weeks, lawyers, but 

also non-lawyers who were doing cutting edge social change work. [01:36:02] We brought 

in investigative journalists. We brought in people who did film documentaries that were 

designed to foment social change. We brought in people like Bryan Stevenson. We brought 

in Paul Farmer, who’s famous for the health work he’s done around the world. And they all 

served as inspirational examples to students, and examples of how thrilling and fun it could 

be to do social change work. But they also taught very sophisticated lessons through the 

nature of their varied work about some of the different ways that one could do this work 

effectively. 

SP: It’s just such a direct through line from your experience in Mississippi in 1963, 

shaping how you, you know, shaping your experience in law school.  

EB: Yeah. Another thing I did in [CAP] was create a clinic very much modeled on 

PILRAP. So [CAP] both brought people into the classroom through the Art of Social Change 

to inspire students by talking about their, you know, all these speakers’ different life work 

and methods of social change and exciting examples of particular cases or reform projects. 

But then we also sent students out to do work in our child advocacy clinic. So that took the 

form of, again, sometimes sending them throughout the country to [various] national 

organizations. They would come back and work in the spring, where they would talk in the 

classroom about their different projects. We had some of them working in individual legal 

services type organizations. We had some with class action organizations. We had some with 

more policy reform organizations, not doing litigation, some with legislative committees. 

[01:38:03] So the clinic gave the students this experience of what is it like, what does it 



 
 

43 
 

actually feel like to be doing legal work that’s socially meaningful? And what does it feel 

like to be part of an organization where all the lawyers are doing this.  Are they excited? Do 

they feel good about their work? What would that be like? So particularly, if you’re at a 

place like Harvard Law School, to go back to something I said at the beginning, it’s this 

corporate law environment. A lot of our students come idealistic, kind of the way I was 

when I went to law school. “How can I use my legal career to change the world for the 

better?” And they get here and that just gets drilled out of them. And by the end of their first 

year, so many of them are saying, “Well, I guess I don’t have any choice except to go work 

for a corporate law firm. And anyway, it's going to pay me a ton of money, and it’s going to 

be a really easy life, and it’ll be really easy to get one of those jobs.” It was just made so 

easy. And I think a lot of my work at Harvard Law School was quite deliberately how do I 

keep that spirit of idealism alive in the students who come here with that and help them 

realize that it’s worth it. It’s worth it, and that you’ll get to go out to do work that's going to 

feel good as opposed to, frankly, I think a lot of our corporate law students are going out and 

doing jobs that they hate, and they’re doing them 12 hours a day, six days a week.  

SP: What sort of advice would you give to some of your law students who were 

interested in doing, social justice minded law but were very cognizant of the obstacles and 

the lack of, I guess, financial incentives, and that kind of thing? [01:40:10] 

EB: The lack of what? 

SP: Financial incentive and, the ease that you were just talking about, the ease of 

those corporate jobs. [01:40:17]  



 
 

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EB: Well, you know, I guess there are two options. One, to stick to [the idealistic 

path], and to feel it’s worth it. And there also is a choice in public interest jobs. And I always 

had the relatively luxurious, relatively well [paid public interest jobs]. 

Jesse Paddock: [coughs]. I apologize. 

EB: No. You okay? Do you want some water? 

JP: I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. 

EB: Why don’t we take a break and get your water? [pause]. All right. So, what sort 

of advice? 

SP: What sort of advice would you give to your students? 

EB: [01:40:48] So, I guess I’d give them advice about a couple of options. One is 

stick to it. And there are choices out there. You don’t have to starve. It is true there are lots 

of public interest jobs that are very low paying. There are others that give you a perfectly 

decent income. I myself chose the ones that gave me a decent income, like Legal Defense 

Fund or Legal Action Center. There are a fair number of those jobs out there. You can live 

on that decent income. You also don’t have to do anything forever. So that, you know, if you 

choose one of these jobs, there are also going to be other options down the line. Then there’s 

also the “Okay, lots of you are going to go to the corporate law firms.” First of all, there’s 

some other options out there. There’s just being a small-town lawyer. So, I’ve always 

thought that might be fairly satisfying actually, sort of like being a doctor, that if you just are 

helping people do wills and buy houses and do the stuff of life, that could be satisfying. 

[01:42:06] I’ve got problems with the corporate law world because I feel, as I used to say to 

my students sometimes in the final class, that a lot of that work is actually doing more harm 

than good. You really have to think, if you’re working for one of those law firms, how much 



 
 

45 
 

of the work is going into preventing any form of environmental regulation, any form of 

OSHA regulation, any decent protection for workers, etcetera? So, I think there’s that 

problem. I think people thinking about those corporate law firms have to think about “Do 

you want your life to be meaningful?” You’re probably going to spend a lot of your waking 

hours for the next many decades working. There’s a real difference between working at 

something you care about and find meaningful and think might be making the world better 

as compared to something that’s meaningless and might be making the world worse. And for 

the corporate law job, you’re required to work insane hours to succeed, hours that are really 

incompatible with family life or other life. The final thing I’d say and did say over the years 

is, if you’re going to go to the corporate law route, then change the nature of those law 

firms. Those law firms could be a fantastic vehicle for social justice. And some of them are, 

or at least some of them try to be, to devote a huge number of resources to social justice 

work, though whether it really counteracts the anti-social justice work they do for their rich 

clients is a question you might investigate. But some of these law firms are better than 

others in terms of doing social justice work. And it’s in your power to transform these firms 

and make it so that they’re doing more of that. And frankly, less of the destructive work. 

[01:44:12] 

SP: We’re nearing the end. Thank you so much for all of this. I want to know what 

you think is the most important area of civil rights legislation today.  

EB: That is too hard a question. Too challenging. [But one important issue is poverty 

and the rich poor divide.] Even back when I was at the Legal Defense Fund, I think a lot of 

us felt this, and indeed, LDF leadership felt it was important to start something that was 

called, as I remember, NORI. National Organization for the Rights of the Indigent. But it 



 
 

46 
 

was really part of LDF, although it had a title as if it was a separate organization. So, we 

were conscious, somewhat, some of us, and certainly to some degree, leadership, that anti-

poverty work was really important. And I think over the years I’ve always felt that if you 

really could solve the poverty/inequality problem, well, you’d solve a lot of other problems, 

too. You’d solve a lot of the racial problem and maybe put us in better shape as a result to 

solve more of the racial problem. I think today it may be even more important to think about 

how to challenge the poverty and inequality problem. First of all, inequality has gotten 

worse. So, we’re all conscious of that. That’s outrageous. It doesn’t have to be. There are 

other countries that don’t, indeed, I don’t know that any other country has the inequality 

problem we do. [01:45:57] So we ought to solve that. And I think today, given all the 

resistance to thinking about race as an appropriate category and the resistance to affirmative 

action, resistance to recognition of racial discrimination – I think that resistance is wrong. I 

think the right wing is wrong in what it’s doing and its emphasis. But I also think that 

resistance is real. And for now, we have to live in a world where the Supreme Court has 

eliminated affirmative action as a viable enterprise. It may therefore be even more important 

today to think of anti-poverty work and an anti-poverty agenda, [focusing on] lifting 

everybody up and figuring that, if we could accomplish that, that would address a huge 

amount of the race problem. 

SP: And looking back on the years you spent with LDF –  

EB: And did you have, was the question directed to just the LDF kind of area or did 

you ask? 

SP: Anything. 



 
 

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EB: We have to save the earth. There’s climate change, there’s nuclear [destruction], 

the problem we haven’t solved since the days when I was told to jump under my school desk 

to protect myself against nuclear war. There’s the fact that worldwide, human beings are so 

terrible at organizing themselves that in most countries we’ve got terrible leadership, and 

we’ve got civil wars, and we’ve got desperate poverty. And so, there’s tons of problems out 

there and I think there are times young people get tempted to say, “Oh, well, once we had 

segregation in this country and then I could have thrown myself into this work. [01:48:16] 

But now we don’t have anything that’s so clear cut that’s wrong.” And that’s just always 

been a ridiculous way of thinking. I mean, there’s always tons of problems that need 

addressing. And I think for people who care, it can be just immobilizing to say, “What’s the 

most important problem,” because you can spend the rest of your life trying to figure that 

out. So, it’s better to just throw yourself into the stuff that you have a passion to do. 

SP: And focusing on LDF, if you think about the years that you were there, how do 

you think about that time as, how do you think it shaped the rest of your career? And you’ve 

sort of been answering that this whole time, but how do you reflect upon the time that you 

spent there, as a young person, very fresh out of law school and that being one of the first 

jobs you had? 

EB: I have to speculate because I don’t know. I think it probably made me appreciate 

working with smart, committed people, being part of a group, and in my child welfare work 

and law school work, even though I haven’t felt that collegiality with actual teaching 

colleagues since it’s a very lonely profession, I’ve sort of built groups of people I work with 

outside of the law school. But I think I learned to appreciate working with smart people who 

care about what they’re doing. Learned to appreciate working on things that seem 



 
 

48 
 

meaningful. And [I learned that] even if it’s hard, you feel you’re pushing boulders up the 

hill, you lose the Maxwell case, you work on Furman, you lose the Furman case, [you keep 

going]. [01:50:09] It’s worth struggling because it’s satisfying to try to make things more 

just. And you have to believe that that’s better than the alternative of not trying – that it’s 

both more personally satisfying and that actually you do accomplish some good. 

SP: We could talk for a long time. But for now, is there anything that I didn’t ask 

that you want to talk about? That could be specific cases. It could be LDF-related. It could 

be more Legal Action. 

EB: I’ll just explain, I suppose, my shift to the child welfare area, because it relates 

to one of one of the last things I said to you about how it is hopeless to try to figure out the 

most important thing to work on. You have to kind of go with your passion. So, I started 

working when I came back from my first adoption on matters related to adoption, because I 

was so outraged at how difficult they made it for me to adopt my kids in Peru. And it 

seemed irrational that people would put up barriers between kids who need homes and 

people who want to be parents. And that [and related issues] are what I’ve ended up 

spending near a hundred percent of my time on since and why I started the Child Advocacy 

Program. And I’ve spent a lot of time on trying to make policy related to international 

adoption better. A human rights activist that I work with closely and have co-taught with in 

various of her and my classes, has asked me, “So, you know, why international adoption? 

Aren’t there better ways to help children?” One of my answers is: this is something I know 

about, and this is something I’m passionate about. And I’m sure I’m right about, and I can 

just pour my energy into. And I think that in part, we have to do what we feel motivated to 

do. And that’s going to end up producing more energy for change than if we try to figure out 



 
 

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rationally, well, the most important thing is to do climate change, if you actually aren’t 

feeling emotionally driven to do that. 

SP: And you’ve done that work for, you founded the Child Advocacy Program in –  

EB: Well, I’ve done that work since 1985, when I came back with my first adopted 

child and started teaching a seminar on adoption and reproductive technology. I wrote my 

first book in the area, which I published in 19[93], and started publishing articles and started 

teaching in the area. And did a lot of advocacy before and after starting the Child Advocacy 

Program. 

SP: And how have you seen that evolve and change since you started? 

EB: Well, policy has gotten worse in many ways. So, it’s once again pushing a lot of 

boulders up hills, but hoping that some of your work has short- and long-term impact. 

SP: Well, I think that’s it. 

EB: I think that’s it. 

SP: Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and speaking with us for so 

long today.  

EB: Thank you. [01:53:49]. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]