By Lilys D. McCoy and George W. Brewster Jr.
Progress is rarely linear. It starts, stops, races ahead, suffers mystifying reversals. Sometimes there are grand gestures, moments where one word, an act, a decision delivers a dramatic shift.
Progress of women in the legal profession has followed such a trajectory — nationally and locally. The founders and early members of Lawyers Club of San Diego galvanized moments, big and small, that advanced the status of women in the law. Two anecdotes reveal the grit and resilience that their efforts required.
In 1999, the SDCBA published 100 Years of Justice in honor of its centennial. Included was a piece by attorney Judy Copeland titled “Why I Hated the Bar.” She recounted her first attendance at the annual Bar Dinner where skits employed “liberal use of secretaries dressed up as Playboy bunnies.” Ms. Copeland was appalled, but undaunted. She arranged for herself and several other womento be on the Bar Dinner Committee. They innocuously volunteered to provide the bunnies for the next dinner. “Imagine the group’s horror,” she wrote, “when the following year … they got an anonymous woman dressed head to toe in a rabbit costume!”
Former Congresswoman Lynn Schenk recalled, as a young lawyer, she and other women tried to join various SDCBA committees, but were rejected by the Bar president. “He said there was already ‘one girl’ on the Bar Board of Directors … wasn’t that enough?!” That, she said in a 2007 interview, “was really the impetus for us to start Lawyers Club; they didn’t even want our volunteer time.” Lawyers Club turns 50 in 2022.
Those vignettes represent important moments that, fortunately, were followed by significant shifts. In 1985, Deputy District Attorney (now Judge) Melinda Lasater became the first female SDCBA president. When asked what being the first woman president meant to her, Judge Lasater replied: “Naturally, I considered that finally having a woman serve in that role was a major step forward for [the SDCBA], our legal profession, women lawyers, and public lawyers. I never thought it was about me, though … There were other extremely well-qualified women who had run in the past and they paved the way as we collectively learned how to successfully elect a woman as President of the SDCBA.”
Six years after Judge Lasater’s term as President, there was another shift: three courts in San Diego were led by women — the Superior Court by Justice Judith McConnell, the Municipal Court by Judge Patricia Cowett, and the Southern District of California by Judge Judith Keep.
Recalling Senator Hillary Clinton’s famous line, “Women’s rights are human rights,” it is fitting to acknowledge that equality in the legal profession has never been a singular pursuit by a lone group. It has been — indeed must always be — a joint effort by all who value inclusion.
Lawyers Club was one of the first of many diverse bar associations founded in San Diego. These organizations inspired and trained leaders, many of them women, who have in turn inspired the San Diego legal community to place the values of diversity and inclusion at the forefront. The fruit of those efforts can be seen in a diverse Bar Board, a strong Committee on Diversity and Inclusion, and slow but steady gains on the Bench and in public and private law firms.
While the arc toward equality is non-linear, we can celebrate that today, the San Diego Superior Court is led by the third woman to be Presiding Judge, Judge Lorna Alksne; the Fourth District Court of Appeals is led by Justice Judith McConnell; the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of California is led by Judge Margaret Mann; the Chief Magistrate Judge for the Southern District is Judge Barbara Major; and the most senior of the active Ninth Circuit judges in San Diego is JudgeM. Margaret McKeown. To that illustrious list we can add D.A. Summer Stephan, Federal Defender Kathy Nester, and City Attorney Mara Elliott.
The authors wish to thank Lizzette Herrera Castellanos for important contributions to this piece.