CALL ME PHAEDRA. Lise Pearlman

      The idea for a biography of Fay Stender struck me near the turn of this century. I was attending a federal lawyer-judge conference in Napa County, California. One panel drew a capacity crowd to hear what makes a great trial lawyer. Historically, trial lawyers have seen themselves as courtroom gladiators. Federal prosecutors were taught that trial lawyers were “the fighter pilots and emergency room surgeons of the law.” To craft persuasive storylines to win over juries time and again, top trial lawyers have to not only master the facts and law of each case, but possess charismatic personalities. In the traditionally macho world of the courtroom, top practitioners have often been compared to champion boxers. Like Muhammad Ali, many hone the ability to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” Great trial lawyers have drawn overflow galleries of spectators to admire how they established rapport with prospective jurors, landed punches in opening argument, then took punches and punched back in direct and cross-examinations and in closing arguments. As the panel discussion concluded, the moderator put up on the screen a list of about twenty famous American lawyers he thought best fit the criteria they had agreed upon. All but two of those listed were male. The two women seemed hastily named as an afterthought.

      Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (one of the women named) graduated in 1952 near the top of her class at Stanford Law School. (Chief Justice William Rehnquist was first in the same class; my senior law partner John Wells was second.) Nevertheless, despite scores of applications, she could not find a job in any private law firm. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had the same disheartening experience after graduating first in her class at Columbia Law School in 1959.) At the start of her career, O’Connor juggled raising her two sons with part-time work as a government attorney. She became known for her negotiating skills –- not for mastering the grueling combat of jury trials, where women litigators were still shunned. O’Connor’s career path took her to working for Goldwater’s 1964 campaign for the presidency, then to state political office in 1965, and a decade as an Arizona trial and appellate judge before President Reagan elevated her from relative obscurity to become the first woman justice on the highest court in the land.

      The other woman lawyer listed at the panel discussion was Sarah Weddington, known for trying one landmark case before a panel of three federal judges in Dallas, Texas, in 1970 — Roe v. Wade. Weddington had graduated from the University of Texas Law School just three years earlier, only to face the same repeated rejection by private law firms in 1967 as Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg had experienced in the 1950s. Weddington instead joined activists researching ways to challenge the constitutionality of anti-abortion laws. In 1971, the twenty-six-year old advocate gained instant fame when she won her maiden argument before the United States Supreme Court. Weddington was then elected to the Texas legislature, served in the Carter administration and made her career as a professor and speaker.

      Sitting in the audience as a former litigator and judge, I felt that the gray-haired male jurist who chose Weddington and O’Connor as great trial lawyers on a list headed by Clarence Darrow displayed an appalling double standard. So few women lawyers apparently came to mind that the moderator just picked two with instant name recognition for pioneering achievements in the law, regardless of their lack of jury trial experience. When the program ended, I asked Chief Judge Marilyn Hall Patel if she could think of a woman trial lawyer who should have made that list. She instantly named her deceased former colleague Fay Stender, who had served with her in the mid-1970s on the San Francisco board of the American Civil Liberties Union.

      I was already aware of Stender’s reputation for relentless pursuit of justice for unpopular causes. Nearly two decades earlier, California Women Lawyers, on whose board I served, began giving out an annual award in her name to outstanding women lawyers exhibiting similar passion for serving the disadvantaged and effecting societal change. Yet I knew almost nothing about Stender’s legal career other than the realization that she must have overcome extraordinary challenges. Women litigators were still rare when I graduated from law school in 1974, a generation after Stender graduated.

      I decided to follow up. I talked to Drucilla Ramey, one of the founding mothers of California Women Lawyers, who had since become the Executive Director of the San Francisco Bar Association. Through Dru I met her husband Marvin Stender, who had previously been married to Fay. Marvin Stender was himself a veteran trial lawyer still practicing in San Francisco. When I told him I wanted to write about Fay’s career, he said, “It’s about time,” and handed me a box of her legal files he had just fetched from his attic.

      I soon read a controversial tribute to Fay Stender penned by former Ramparts magazine reporters Peter Collier and David Horowitz. “Requiem for a Radical” was first published by New West magazine in March 1981, two months shy of the first anniversary of her suicide. Though cathartic for the authors, this insider criticism of the Movement by fellow Leftists caused an immediate uproar among the circle of Bay Area activists to which Collier and Horowitz were still thought to belong. Most provocative of all was their quotation of a colleague at her funeral, who called her death the “end of an era.” Some branded the authors traitors to the cause. “Requiem for a Radical” did in fact presage the pair’s total public rejection of Movement politics. In 1989, the two