Nadine Strossen: Are there enough women in the legal profession? | Big Think

Nadine Strossen: Are there enough women in the legal profession?

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Its a good thing when you lose count.

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Nadine Strossen:

Nadine Strossen is the John Marshall Harlan II Professor of Law at New York Law School. From 1991 through 2008, she served as President of the American Civil Liberties Union, the first woman to head the nation’s largest and oldest civil liberties organization. Her most recent book is HATE: Why We Should Resist It With Free Speech, Not Censorship.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Nadine Strossen: The numbers are very high, but the distribution is very skewed as is true in other prestigious professions. In law schools now, I believe that in most schools and across the law student population, generally women are at least 50% of the student body, if not higher. We are also so well represented at the faculty level that I lose count and that is great. When you no longer have to count as opposed to my seven years of higher education at Harvard college and law school where I had not a single female professor at either the law school or the college and I was painfully aware of the number of female students in both places. I went to Harvard college when women students were separately admitted under a strict 4:1 ratio, men to women and at the law school at the time, we were about 10% of the student body. So, that has changed dramatically. A lot of barriers have been crashed. It was not until 1981 that we had the first female supreme court justice, but those numbers are still very small and Justice Ginsburg[Phonetic] is now complaining with force and reason about being the token female member of the supreme court and we know the judges and I would say in politics women are particularly underrepresented, in the corporate world, particularly underrepresented. I think we are doing quite well on law faculties and as law school deans.

Recorded On: 2/14/08