Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Lipshaw, Jeffrey M.

English

A Law Professor’s Love-Hate Relationship with the Restatement (Second) of Contracts

Catá Backer, Larry

Konnoth, Craig

Molina, Melinda

Robinson, Alfreda

Sinha, Anita

How to Become a Full-Time Law Professor – A Workshop for Aspirants

Gustafson, Lindsey P.

The Compounding Effects of Assessment: How Our Failure to Coordinate Formative Assessments May Impact Their Validity

Dinerstein, Robert

Rosser, Ezra

Journal of Legal Education, Volume 73, Number 1 (Fall 2024)
From the Editors
This issue includes articles, conference transcripts, and book reviews that 
date to 2019. The woeful delay is solely the result of our own editorial failure, 
and we wish to apologize on behalf of the Journal to our readers and to the many 
contributing authors who put their trust in us.  Rest assured that procedures 
have been established to prevent reoccurrence of such unacceptable time 
lags. But do know that we appreciate having fallen far short of professional 
standards in this instance.
The delay we caused means that although the articles and transcripts were 
up to date as of 2020, the articles may neglect later events or subsequent 
relevant scholarship. The authors bear no fault for such omissions as their 
works were current through the time publication was expected. 
The issue begins with four articles that get to the heart of the work done by 
law professors. Leading off, Professor Nancy Ehrenreich’s contribution, When 
Professors Get in Their Own Way: Law Teaching and Academic Perfectionism, describes the 
problem of perfectionism and suggests ways to escape its deadly grip. In Fifty 
More Ways to Promote Scholarship Within a Law School Community, professors Steven 
Wilf and Jeremy Paul provide concrete advice on how to foster a community 
of scholars. Professor Lindsay Gustafson’s article, The Compounding Effects of 
Assessment: How Our Failure to Coordinate Formative Assessments May Impact Their Validity, 
aims to assist law professors in the development of coordinated formative 
assessment systems that can fairly and accurately evaluate students. Finally, in 
their article, Learning Outcomes that Law Schools Have Adopted: Seizing the Opportunity 
to Help Students and Clients, professors Neil Hamilton and Jerry Organ give a 
series of suggestions on how law schools can implement competency-based 
education. 
The issue then transitions to the transcripts from five panels that were 
part of the Fourth National People of Color (NPOC) Legal Scholarship 
Conference, which took place at American University Washington College of 
Law in March 2019. Each of the panels featured leading scholars engaged in 
meaningful conversations. The insights from these panels should be of interest 
to people throughout the legal academy. The panels included in this issue are:
• How to Become a Full-Time Law Professor—A Workshop for Aspirants. Moderated by 
Professor Alfreda Robinson, with the following professors and panelists: 
Larry Catá Backer, Craig Konnoth, Melinda Molina, and Anita Sinha. 
• So You Want to Publish a Book? Moderated by Professor Suzanne Kim, with 
the following professors and panelists: Steven W. Bender, Susan Carle, 
Angela J. Davis, Clara Platter, and Katheryn Russell-Brown.
Journal of Legal Education
• Balancing Scholarship, Teaching and Service to Succeed on the Tenure Track – A Workshop 
for Pretenure Colleagues and Faculty Aspirants. Moderated by Professor Brenda 
V. Smith, with the following professors and panelists: José Gabilondo, 
Danielle Holley-Walker, Kristin N. Johnson, and Rose Cuison-Villazor.
• It’s All Write: Teaching Legal Writing as Resistance. Moderated by Professor Jane 
E. Cross, with the following professors and panelists: Brenda Gibson, 
Tiffany N. Jeffers, Latisha Nixon-Jones, Teri McMurtry-Chubb, Shakira 
D. Pleasant, and Vanita “Saleema” Snow. 
• Mindfulness in the Law School Environment. Moderated by Professor Erika 
George, with the following professors and panelists: Nicky Boothe and 
Kellyn McGee. 
These NPOC panels collectively are full of practical advice related to 
research, writing, and teaching. The panels also foreground the unique 
challenges facing people of color as they navigate everything from becoming 
a law professor to the process of publishing a book. Though the issue is late 
being published, the issues and ideas raised by the panels remain important 
to this day. 
Finally, the issue ends with three book reviews. Professors Jennifer A. 
Gundlach and Mark C. Niles start things off with a review of David M. 
Becker’s 2019 book, Lessons Learned: Stories of a Teacher and Teaching. Though a 
work of fiction, as Gundlach and Niles’ review highlights, the stories Becker 
tells convey the seriousness with which the main character approaches his role 
as a teacher. Professor Stephen Wermiel’s thoughtful review of Justice John 
Paul Stevens’s 2019 autobiography, The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 
94 Years, lets readers into the jurist’s mind and along the way provides valuable 
insights into some of the many cases he worked on while on the Court. Finally, 
Professor Akilah N. Folami’s glowing review of Meera E. Deo’s book, Unequal 
Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia, captures in part why the 2019 book 
connected with so many professors in the academy. 
Overall, we hope the contents of this issue make it worth exploring even 
if these articles, conference transcripts, and book reviews should have been 
published years ago. Our deepest apologies to the authors. We trust readers 
will see the long-term and continuing value of their work. 
Robert Dinerstein
Ezra Rosser


From the Editors

Ciolli, Anthony M.

Continuing Legal Education Accreditation and the First Amendment

Sirota, Rima

Mandatory Anti-Bias CLE: A Serious Problem Deserves More Meaningful Response

Hamilton, Neil

Organ, Jerome

Learning Outcomes that Law Schools Have Adopted: Seizing the Opportunity to Help Students, Legal Employers, Clients, and Law Schools

Avedian, Arevik

699
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 72, Number 3 & 4 (2024)
Book Review
Herbert M. Kritzer, Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research, Cheltenham, 
U.K.; Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021, pp. 168, $28.95 
(paperback).
Reviewed by Arevik Avedian*
The Elgar Advanced Introductions series aims to be accessible and to 
develop critiques of the field to challenge the understanding of scholars, 
students, and policymakers.1 Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research (ELR) 
covers essential principles of empirical research in law and stimulates critical 
thinking. Labeled an “advanced introduction,” the book includes information 
more fitting to an “introduction,” as it lacks the rigor expected of advanced 
ELR. It offers a daunting amount of ELR history and omits discussion on 
some of the most recent advancements in empirical legal methodology, which 
is a missed opportunity to make the book relevant for current and forthcoming 
ELR. It stops short of developing critiques of the field that challenge the 
understanding of empirical research in law. The book is successful as an 
accessible introduction for readers with little or no knowledge of the subject.
The Structure of the Book
The book has three main parts: history, methodology, and examples of 
ELR. It starts with a brief introduction of ELR and a “plan of the book” 
outlining sections covered in the book. Chapter 2 in Part I covers the history 
of empirical legal research; chapters 3-5 in Part II cover methodology; and 
chapters 6-8 in Part III provide an overview of ELR divided by areas of law.  
Part I: “Brief” history of ELR
This section offers a comprehensive coverage of the history of ELR which, 
like the rest of the book, heavily draws from Kritzer’s earlier research and 
publications. Discussions in this and subsequent chapters are largely limited 
1 Elgar Advanced Introduction series, Edward Elgar Publishing, https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/
usd/book-series/education/elgar-advanced-introductions-series.html (last visited Mar. 5, 
2024).
*Arevik Avedian is a Lecturer on Law and the Director of the Empirical Research Services 
Department at Harvard Law School. 
700 Journal of Legal Education
to literature in the English language, which likely contributes to the book’s 
extensive coverage of the United States and England. 
Although this chapter purports to be a “brief” history, it is indeed an 
exhaustive chronicle of ELR. It details history for around 100 years, starting 
from pre-World War II era, and is subdivided by different periods based 
on various technological developments over time. This section would have 
benefited from an elaboration of the history of empirical legal education, since 
the legal field is still lagging vis-à-vis many other fields in embracing empirics 
in research or practice. Nonetheless, empirical legal history enthusiasts will 
likely find this section stimulating. 
Part II: Methodology
The methodology section is divided into three parts (chapters 3-5) titled 
preliminary issues, data collection, and data analysis. Discussions in chapters 
4 and 5 are subdivided by quantitative and qualitative research. 
Preliminary issues
This is the first chapter of the methodology section, and it starts off by 
forewarning that the author’s goal with these chapters is to introduce 
methodological issues to the readers of ELR literature and is in no way 
intended to prepare them to conduct empirical research. This section provides 
general information important to conducting empirical research. The material 
is occasionally presented in a disorganized manner, which could be somewhat 
confusing for a reader new to the field. 
The author makes the distinction between qualitative and quantitative ELR 
and discusses examples of research projects that combine these methods. A 
substantial discussion of Type I through Type IV errors is presented in this 
section. Discussing types of errors above the first and second kind seems 
excessive for an introductory book, as these errors are not formalized,2 are 
rarely found in social sciences,3 and are not widely accepted.4 As the author 
had to truncate important discussions in the book because of limited space, 
a shortened and more precise discussion of the errors and ELR history would 
have provided the space to adequately discuss several omitted but significant 
issues of research design. 
Rules of inference are often ignored in legal scholarship, with key lessons 
from the “credibility revolution”5 in social and natural science disciplines 
2 The SAGe encyclopediA of educATionAl ReSeARch, MeASuReMenT, And evAluATion (Charlotte Tate, 
ed. 2018). 
3 Charlotte Ursula Tate, The Importance of Type III and Type IV Epistemic Errors for Improving Empirical 
Science, in ReSeARch inTeGRiTy: BeST pRAcTiceS foR The SociAl And BehAvioRAl ScienceS 316 (Lee Jussim 
et al., eds. 2022).
4 Dieter Rasch, Hypothesis Testing and the Error of the Third Kind, 54 pSych. TeST & ASSeSSMenT ModelinG 
1 (2012).
5 Joshua D. Angrist & Jörn-Steffen Pischke, The Credibility Revolution in Empirical 
701Book Review: Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research
being disregarded.6 ELR impacts often extend beyond academia to real-world 
issues and arguably have the potential to influence policies more than any 
other field. Lawyers and judges are more and more often relied upon to judge 
evidence-based information, which requires the ability to evaluate its design, 
data, and methods for accuracy and credibility. 
It is critical that legal scholars and practitioners learn to recognize “poor” 
evidence, whether teaching in classrooms, reading or producing legal 
scholarship, or practicing in courtrooms. While the author extensively covers 
what a research question is, he offers passing discussions of some of the 
pertinent issues around validity and reliability, dispersed in different sections 
of the book. The author missed the opportunity to discuss these issues in more 
depth, emphasizing issues such as developing research questions, theories 
with their implications, rival hypotheses, credibility7 of measurement and 
estimation, replicability and validity, and other vital components of empirical 
research. 
Data collection
This section covers diverse methods of data collection in varying levels 
of detail. Examples include interviews and observations for qualitative 
data, experiments and quasi-experiments, surveys, government records, 
administrative data, and other types of quantitative data collected through 
direct and indirect observation. The author’s generous use of examples to 
introduce diverse data sources makes this section useful and easy to read and 
follow.
Few empirical books cover both qualitative and quantitative research, with 
the weight of the coverage heavily skewed toward quantitative studies. Kritzer’s 
elaboration of qualitative data and methods is important, as the number of 
qualitative and mixed qualitative/quantitative studies has drastically increased 
in recent decades. The information provided by Kritzer presents a good 
selection of qualitative studies.
The author makes a passing reference to changes in computational 
technologies for analyzing qualitative and quantitative data over time but 
misses an opportunity to introduce data acquired through new and emerging 
analytical approaches used in ELR, such as machine learning and artificial 
intelligence (AI) for natural language processing (NLP) or text analysis. 
Discussing data obtained through novel methods used in the field would have 
made this section more current and relevant. 
Kritzer introduces surveys as a prominent source of data in empirical research 
but underplays online surveys by alluding to the “growth of spam email, and 
Economics: How Better Research Design Is Taking the Con out of Econometrics, 24 J. 
Econ. PErsPEctivEs 2 (2010).
6 Lee Epstein & Gary King, The Rules of Inference, 69 univ. chi. l. rEv. 1 (2002).
7 Jason Chin et al, Improving the Credibility of Empirical Legal Research: Practical Suggestions for Researchers, 
Journals, and Law Schools, 3 l., tEch & humans 1 (2021). 
702 Journal of Legal Education
challenges with the IRB (Institutional Review Board).” Online survey-based 
research in empirical legal studies has grown, especially as access to online 
platforms such as MTurk has expanded. These platforms allow scholars to 
recruit participants for their surveys and experiments for a fraction of the cost 
and time that it would take them to conduct a nationally representative survey. 
There are many problems around the reliability and validity of data 
gathered through surveys, especially online, and it is often questioned whether 
the sampled participants can be considered representative of the population 
studied.8 When the sampling technique is proper and there is an indication 
that the sample is representative or not skewed, courts often accept studies 
with substantial missing data and nonresponse. However, they often reject 
studies that fail to demonstrate that errors and omissions are not distributed 
randomly, thus biasing the results. 
There are oft-occurring issues with survey bias, such as sampling, response, 
nonresponse, interviewer, instability, omitted variable, and measurement error 
bias, which were not discussed by Kritzer. These are all important issues to 
stimulate critical thinking for legal scholars writing their own scholarship, or 
evaluating published empirical papers or evidence presented in a court case. 
In this section, Kritzer describes a few examples of unintentional errors in 
empirical research, including his own. Such acknowledgments highlight the 
importance of self-critique to ensure the integrity of work produced9 and to 
raise awareness about issues with validity in empirical studies. The likelihood 
of human or machine error (deliberate or unintended) exists at different stages 
of an empirical study, from research design to generalization. The integrity 
of empirical studies is often violated because of missing and modified data, 
outliers, or data cleaning and wrangling. Biased or erroneous published 
empirical papers are the cause of replication crisis10 in social sciences as well 
as other fields. 
Instances of fabricated or flawed data are generally discovered when a study 
is scrutinized. To evaluate one’s own or others’ empirical work, scholars need 
to become aware of the issues, best practices of research design, common 
types of errors, and issues with validity. While not receiving the attention they 
deserve, many of these issues receive a passing acknowledgment by the author.
Data analysis
Kritzer’s goal with Part II is to provide a sufficient background for the 
reader to understand works in ELR. To learn which methods are covered in the 
book, one must read this entire section, as the names of methods of statistical 
8 Adriana Z. Robertson & Albert H. Yoon, You Get What You Pay For: An Empirical Examination of 
the Use of MTurk in Legal Scholarship, 72 vand. l. rEv. 5 (2019).
9 Andrew Gelman, Ethics and Statistics: Honesty and Transparency Are Not Enough, 30 
chancE 1 (2017).
10 Schmidt, S., Shall we Really do it Again? The Powerful Concept of Replication is Neglected in the Social 
Sciences, 13 rEv. gEn. Psych. 2 (2009).
703Book Review: Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research
analysis covered in the book are not listed anywhere. Adding the list of names 
to the table of contents, the plan of the book, or the index would have made 
finding a specific method easier. 
From the preface, it seems that Kritzer has written the book with beginners 
in mind. However, there is an inconsistent assumed level of familiarity with 
various statistical terms in the book. While some parts of the book provide 
basic information, such as defining terms like “legal” and “empirical,” others 
lack explanation of important concepts.11 Furthermore, the data analysis 
section includes instances of disorganization, unnecessarily complicated 
descriptions, outdated terminology, and omitted or contested information,12 
which could confuse the not-so-technical reader.
The author’s target audience, which likely would not have adequate 
knowledge of analysis and inference, might find the material covered herein 
difficult to absorb. Regrettably, a reader largely distant from quantitative 
analysis may confuse lack of information or clarity with their inability to 
understand statistical concepts. 
A core goal of any empirical book published today in the field of law should 
be to eradicate fear of mathematics and encourage legal scholars to embrace it, 
whether as a critical consumer or producer of empirical research. An important 
part of that is to teach mathematics and statistical analysis in a more coherent 
and easier-to-understand manner.
The analysis section generally covers many issues pertinent to methodology. 
The methods discussion gets a bit more intricate as we get into bivariate analysis 
in Section 5.1.8. A reader without any prior knowledge of the tests described 
in this section, such as Chi2 or ANOVA, may have difficulty grasping the 
material. Whereas the author’s discussion of linear regression analysis in the 
bivariate section, along with graphs, makes the concepts easier to understand. 
Kritzer advises that discussion in this section only touches the surface of 
empirical analysis. The section offers little discussion of methods beyond 
linear regression analysis, omitting a vast amount of research including 
probability, nonlinear, nonparametric, count, survival, time series, game-
theoretic, Bayesian models, or more advanced methods used in contemporary 
legal research, such as in the areas of big data and AI. 
Scholars doing empirical research often conduct various post-estimation 
techniques to show a genuine attempt to test the credibility or reliability of 
their study results. Exploring issues such as nonnormally distributed standard 
errors; omitted or confounding variables; outliers, multicollinearity, data or 
coder reliability, are only a few examples of such checks. Outside the legal 
field, papers with appendices including robustness/sensitivity checks that 
are longer than the main body of the paper are becoming more and more 
11 For example, discussion of Type I error mentions significance level without defining it.
12 An example is discussion of kurtosis as a measure of peakedness (footnote 47). For more, see 
Peter H. Westfall, Kurtosis as Peakedness, 1905 - 2014. R.I.P, 68 am. stat. 3 (2014).
704 Journal of Legal Education
common. In recent years we have seen drastic improvement in the quality of 
scholarship in the field of empirical legal studies, which is likely attributable to 
law professors’ increased training in quantitative and qualitative methodology.
Legal scholars should be encouraged to competently scrutinize empirical 
work, consider rival explanations, and dissect every possible way the evidence 
that’s presented could be proved wrong. Replications of existing empirical 
studies are necessary for the intellectual community to diligently reenforce 
norms and best practices of statistical inference.13 To minimize future mistakes 
and move the legal field forward, such assessments should become an important 
part of ELR conversation.14 Equally important are recommendations for 
dealing with violated assumptions, limitations, and issues with credibility. 
Kritzer elaborates on the issue of endogeneity and only briefly discusses 
some of the issues related to causation at the end of the analysis section. While 
relevant and important, types of robustness checks, importance of replications, 
and recommendations for dealing with threats to credibility were not addressed 
by the author. Overall, this section covers many important issues in ELR and 
offers a general baseline of knowledge to anyone interested in ELR.
Part III: Substantive examples
This final section of the book divides ELR into three parts, pertinent to 
institutions, key actors, and subjects of the law. While some areas are covered 
in exhausting detail (e.g., attitudinal model), Kritzer advises that his review of 
ELR is limited in scope and should not be considered a comprehensive review 
in any given area. 
Readers should be aware that Section 8.2, which covers law and business 
organizations as subjects of law, is limited compared with other topics. This 
section is based on detailed summaries of selected papers published in 
the Journal of Legal Studies, which likely does limited justice to this field, 
especially because of its significant contribution to ELR. Areas not discussed 
in the book include bankruptcy, criminal, environmental, family, health, 
human/civil rights, insurance, international, immigration, labor, patent and 
tax law, among others. 
Because of space limitations, some of the research covered in this section is 
cited while other research isn’t. The author’s recommendation to use Google 
Scholar to locate the discussed research when citation is missing is less than 
ideal. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to which topics were chosen to be 
cited or discussed significantly more thoroughly than others. Standardization 
of citations would have reduced potential bias in the uneven coverage of the 
literature. 
13 Richard O. Lempert, Growing Up in Law & Society: The Pulls of Policy and Methods, 2013 Ann. Rev. l. 
& Soc. Sci., at 9.
14 Gelman, supra note 9.
705Book Review: Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research
Examples for some of the areas are organized with the use of bullet points, 
which makes their discussion more engaging and easier to follow than others. 
In general, this section would probably be easier to follow if it introduced 
fewer examples with more discussion of data and methods used therein and 
included examples that had issues with validity or reliability. 
Although not traditionally covered in empirical books, illustrating the 
structure of empirical articles could have been another useful addition to this 
section. Law students and scholars are often intimidated by empirical papers, 
and an overview of the components of empirical papers is a worthwhile effort 
that helps to ease anxiety and produce more effective consumers of the ELR 
literature. 
Although this section’s usefulness is limited because of a lack of citations for 
many of the works discussed, it would likely be useful for scholars interested in 
learning about ELR. Separation by topics makes it easier to locate examples 
in a specific area of law. Overall, Kritzer succeeds in his goal with Part III to 
provide a “sense of the breadth of ELR work” by introducing various areas of 
ELR and covering many important studies.
Conclusion
In summary, Kritzer’s Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research provides a 
substantial overview of the breadth and possibilities of empirical research and 
will probably be most useful to a reader interested in the history and examples 
of ELR. The book contains a thorough introduction to methodologies used 
in empirical research that will be of special interest to beginners in the field. 
The methodology section will likely be less useful for scholars and students 
already proficient in conducting empirical research, as it omits advanced 
methods used by legal scholars in the twenty-first century. They may, however, 
find the section of substantive examples useful in providing insights into work 
produced in other areas. The last section, as well as the data collection section, 
could be useful for data sources, research and replication ideas for (1) faculty 
who are (considering) teaching empirical legal research and (2) students who 
are assigned to conduct a replication or an original empirical research as part 
of their curriculum. 


Book Review of Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research

Cross, Jane E.

Gibson, Brenda

Jeffers, Tiffany N.

McMurtry-Chubb, Teri

Nixon-Jones, Latisha

Pleasant, Shakira D.

Snow, Saleema

It’s All Write: Teaching Legal Writing as Resistance

Arterton, Janet Bond

706
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 72, Number 3 & 4 (2024)
*Janet Bond Arterton, The Honorable Judge Arterton was sworn in as a United States District 
Court judge for the District of Connecticut in 1995. Her private litigation career concentrated on 
employment and labor law.
Book Review
Lauren Stiller Rikleen ed., Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women 
Judges, Chicago, IL: ABA Book Publishing, 2023, pp. 336 (Paperback)
Reviewed by Janet Bond Arterton*
At a time when public confidence in the judicial branch is declining and 
reverberations from the Supreme Court majority’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s 
Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), continue to be felt, Her Honor is a book 
that serves to refocus us upon the “longer arc” through this collection of short 
personalized essays by or about twenty-five state and federal women judges. 
This potpourri of judicial “firsts” contains individualized personal reflections, 
history, thoughtful advice, and moments of humor from a broad spectrum of 
female judges born from 1923 to 1979. It is a book that can be picked up and 
savored a bit at a time or in larger chunks. The faint unifying thread explaining 
the selection of these judges is that all have been awarded the American Bar 
Association’s Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, as was 
the editor, Lauren Stiller Rikleen. While these judges’ stories are a snapshot in 
their own words of their childhoods to career achievement, they also include 
references to the legacies of many other female marker judges throughout 
the full range of state, federal, agency, and military judiciaries who suffered 
injustice in their quests to serve justice.
The book’s importance lies in the illustration by these examples of how 
recent this attainment of authority by female judges is. The term “her honor” 
never was even heard in federal court until 1928, when Judge Genevieve R. 
Cline took the bench.  Historically the concept of “honor” was different when 
applied to men and to women, but not when applied to judicial officers. In 
fact, we waited for Black’s Law Dictionary Seventh Edition (1999) to see an 
updated entry for “His Honor; Her Honor.” A year before Associate Justice 
Sandra Day O’Connor was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, 
the Supreme Court dropped “Mr. Justice” in favor of “Justice.” It was a slow-
moving constellation of forces that emerged to alter the historically all-white 
male bench. Only three female federal judges were appointed in the twenty-
one years between 1928 and 1949 (Judge Genevieve R. Cline, U.S. Customs 
Court; Judge Florence Allen, Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, 1934; Judge 
707Book Review: Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges
Burnita Shelton Matthews, U.S. District Court, District of Alabama, 1949). 
But then, notwithstanding long-held sexist attitudes, women began to be 
admitted and to graduate from law schools in increasing numbers (pushing 
against obnoxious male attitudes that law school was wasted on them). 
However, as the well-known humiliating post-graduation experiences 
of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg illustrated, 
finding appropriate employment in law firms and government agencies after 
graduation presented yet another mountain to climb.
The book’s anthology of these remarkable and varied women’s trajectories 
gives context to what happened, starting in 1977, when presidential priorities 
in favor of a more diverse federal judiciary began to change the courts’ gender 
composition.
Currently, the active federal judiciary is 37% women (of whom 24% are 
senior judges); women make up approximately one-third of judges in state 
courts, where positions are achieved by political appointment, election or 
retention election.
But the twentieth-century trajectory was uneven. Presidents Calvin 
Coolidge through John Kennedy each appointed only one female federal judge 
(excluding President Hoover). President Lyndon Johnson appointed three. 
President Richard Nixon and President Gerald Ford each appointed one. 
The advent of Ms. Magazine’s publication mirrored the women’s movement’s 
pressure to open doors for previously disregarded or disrespected women. 
President Jimmy Carter was elected and remarkably appointed forty-one in 
his one term; President George H.W. Bush added thirty-six; President Reagan 
found thirty qualified women, including the first female Supreme Court 
associate justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. President Bill Clinton appointed 
106 (including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second Supreme Court associate 
justice); President George W. Bush appointed seventy-one; President Barack 
Obama, 136 (including the third and fourth female Supreme Court associate 
justices, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan); and President Donald Trump, 
fifty-five, among them the fifth female Supreme Court associate justice, Amy 
Coney Barrett. To date, President Joe Biden has appointed 100 women to 
the federal bench, including Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown 
Jackson. 
Her Honor gives texture to the legacy of female judges who helped weave the 
fabric of women’s judicial history and provides stamina for others to confront 
the continuing work ahead, perhaps toward the goal of Justice Ginsburg’s 
goal of “Nine.” 
The advent of nonpartisan judicial nominating panels initiated by President 
Carter was also a start in dislodging age-old political decision-making by men, 
introducing a process by which individual lawyer applicants could put their 
best selves forward to be considered. Lamentably, the U.S. Senate’s “blue slip 
process” has been retained such that U.S. senators can veto judicial nominees 
from their home state.  
708 Journal of Legal Education
Notwithstanding the emerging new forces, the significant obstacles faced 
by women who aspired to become lawyers and ascend to judicial positions 
reflected deeply entrenched societal and individual attitudes. This resistance 
is echoed in the profiled judges’ experiences, which—while varied—are 
nonetheless sobering. How each individually managed to overcome the 
inertia of historically reinforced prejudice is chastening as well as inspiring. 
Her Honor’s individual stories tell about what it took these women to succeed 
in their individual circumstances, and taken collectively, they make this book 
so much more than a collection of career and personal milestones; it’s very real 
life.
But more uniquely, these judges’ hard-earned wisdom is shared in genuine 
and unvarnished ways, as if they were trying to personally reach out to the 
readers. The often abjectly impoverished childhoods of some and the personal 
family hardships of others underscore why these women are way-pavers. Their 
personal accounts show their hard work, perseverance and courage—and 
luck—as well as the role of strong mothers, supportive family (including some 
“super husbands”), and “villages.” This book offers numerous engrossing 
variations of that theme. The stories by judges who grew up subjected to Jim 
Crow are deeply moving. Some attribute the strength they derived from their 
determined and wise parents to being able to withstand painful exposures to 
the inequities in education and employment. Their insightful conclusions add 
important gravitas to this book. 
Retired Florida Supreme Court Justice Peggy Quince tells her story from 
the lived experience of being a Black girl growing up very poor in the Jim 
Crow South and attending all segregated schools through high school, even 
though Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), was issued when she was 
6. Interestingly, she describes personal benefits to her from the experience of 
persistent segregation. Her underpaid and overworked Black teachers insisted 
that she succeed and punished her for falling below her potential (by telling 
her loving but strict single father). So that she wouldn’t be deprived of learning 
experiences, they introduced her to activities for academic high achievers and 
paid for her to go to events or trips her poverty precluded. These “loving angels” 
even stayed connected with her when she went away to Howard University, an 
environment she found perfectly suited her coming of age, where she learned 
intellectual and social confidence; she even ran (unsuccessfully) for campus 
office, and reports that she learned it’s not the end of the world to lose. Upon 
graduation, uncertain what profession to pursue, she took both medical and 
law school exams, then worked two years to make up her mind which path to 
take. When she entered law school, she had never met any lawyer or judge, 
and her first exposure to nonsegregated education included racial hostilities. 
She learned how to navigate by finding unsuspecting mentors (including her 
future husband)—i.e., more “angels.” She thrived for thirteen years in the 
Florida Attorney General’s office, learning that conferring with colleagues on 
case handling was critically important and disparaging “government lawyers” 
was unwarranted. After her appointment to the Florida Supreme Court, she 
709Book Review: Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges
found new friends and mentors and learned “[n]ot only was it good to receive 
help, but it was also good and a part of our responsibility to be a mentor and 
friend to others.”
The rocky road for women in the military is told by Linda Strite Murnane, 
retired chief circuit military judge for the Eastern Circuit in Washington, 
D.C. Reminiscent of the overt military gender discrimination in Frontiero v. 
Richardson, 411 U.S. 679 (1973), the early career of Air Force Col. Murnane 
features shocking injustices, starting with her enlistment in 1974 at age 22, when 
she was required to declare that she had no children and acknowledged she 
would be discharged if she became pregnant and disciplined or prosecuted for 
falsifying this document. Her contemporaneous male counterparts were under 
no such requirements and would not have been separated from the service for 
their parenthood. Lawyers with the ACLU, including Attorney Ruth Bader 
Ginsburg, successfully challenged such policies. However, the military’s tin ear 
continued when her application for the Air Force’s Funded Legal Education 
Program was denied because she hadn’t shown “‘commitment.” Her supervisor 
told her that graduation from the Air Force Academy would have helped make 
this showing, except for the fact that no women were eligible to attend when 
she was an undergraduate. So she enrolled in night law school in New Orleans 
while simultaneously working full time at a base in Biloxi, 100 miles from her 
home. Apparently, this showed sufficient “commitment” and she was accepted 
to the Air Force Legal Education Program. She had two babies during law 
school, for which she got a total of fifteen days’ maternity leave following two 
surgical births.
After she transferred to become a military attorney or judge advocate 
at her California home base, she was directed to attend a six-week training 
assignment at an Alabama base at a time when her husband was medically 
incapacitated and her infant was in pediatric intensive care. Her resistance to 
the timing and location of this assignment was met by her senior legal officer, 
who gave her the choice of being a lawyer or a mother and required her choice 
by the end of the day.
Because of obstacles like these, there were very few female military judges 
and senior women from whom she could seek guidance and advice. However, 
her male chief circuit judge to whom she had earlier cautiously reported sexual 
harassment supported her future career and ensured good assignments. By 
2004, when she retired, the Air Force had many more female judges, along 
with its first female chief judge. Although she agrees that the core qualities for 
military professionalism have nothing to do with gender, her opportunities to 
demonstrate these qualifications in her early military career were few.
Some of these profiled judges immigrated to the U.S. as children. When 
they arrived, three spoke no English (Judge Rya W. Zobel, Judge Rosemary 
Barkett, and Judge Fernande R.V. Duffy), an obstacle they successfully 
overcame. 
710 Journal of Legal Education
In retrospect, an enormous hole in American judiciaries resulted from overt 
discrimination because female judges were regarded as an anomaly rather than 
as critical to providing a balanced diverse bench reflecting the society to be 
served. There are numerous statistical studies and scholarly analyses about the 
history of women on the bench. There are pie charts and graphs galore. Judges 
and justices have written brilliant autobiographies. But Her Honor offers succinct 
personal wisdom from these “path-makers” (as Justice Ginsburg called them) 
in their own words presenting what they want to share and their wisdom about 
what they learned along the way. For example, the remarkable Judge Patricia 
McGowan Wald, the first woman on the D.C. Court of Appeals, a judge 
on the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 
and recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom, reflected: “Looking back, I 
do not regret the times I stuck my neck out or departed from the prevailing 
view. My regrets are confined to the times I didn’t.” Ninth Circuit Court of 
Appeals Judge M. Margaret McKeown, who survived both a tortured three-
year Senate confirmation process and a deadly mountain avalanche in Tibet, 
prides herself on having kept her values intact even though her pro bono 
legal work advocating for the rights of women and LGBTQ people prompted 
contentious grilling during her confirmation process. For her, these projects 
were some of her most fascinating and meaningful undertakings: “I wouldn’t 
have done anything differently.” Her takeaway—a federal judicial nomination 
can’t be curated; it’s a political process in which the nominee is but a chess 
piece, and it would be a mistake to forgo a meaningful legal practice in an 
effort to secure a judicial nomination.
Retired Judge Ann Claire Williams from the Seventh Circuit urges 
accepting opportunities even though they do not seem to be part of one’s plan, 
because unexpected experiences and valuable contacts may emerge. Mary M. 
Schroeder, retired chief justice of the Ninth Circuit Court, learned from her 
long prior experience shepherding the Violence Against Women Act legislation 
that listening to all sides of a disagreement is critical for understanding how 
to respond. She also argues persuasively that participating in organizations 
was an important avenue for voicing her concerns because the organizations 
magnify an individual voice. 
Canadian Justice Beverly McLachlin learned to deal with criticism 
constructively by viewing it objectively, sorting the valid from the invalid, 
avoiding the “perfection trap” and being consistent in deciding which criticism 
to ignore and which to respond to.
Overall, however, Her Honor unnecessarily “babysits” the reader. In addition 
to an abundance of “blurbs” about the book, and an extensive and thoughtful 
foreword by Dahlia Lithwick, each chapter has an introduction by the editor 
that forecasts what the reader should take away from each judge’s offering. 
Further, while the acknowledgments section reflects that organization of the 
book was a much-discussed issue, it seemed awkward to have the photograph 
and biography for the profiled judge come after the judge’s own words. 
711Book Review: Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges
Quite properly, Her Honor does not weigh in on the debate about whether 
there is a difference in decision-making between male and female judges, e.g., 
Justice O’Connor’s equivalence of “ a wise old woman and a wise old man” 
or Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina.” Nevertheless, many of the stories carry 
a message of the value of sisterhood, of other women to whom these judges 
looked for guidance or reassurance, and of the pleasure in other women’s 
success. Judge Consuelo Bland Marshall, the first woman to serve as chief of the 
U.S. District Court, Central District of California, gives an adoring account of 
how California’s first Black female state court judge, Vaino Spencer, initially 
reached out to her, served her tea with china and silverware in chambers, and 
remained her mentor and inspiration on matters of career and life throughout 
Judge Spencer’s life and judicial career.
Justice O’Connor was quoted in the September 2001 Federal Lawyer judicial 
profile as saying, “I think the important fact about my appointment is not that 
I will decide cases as a woman, but that I am a woman who will get to decide 
cases.” 
It will be interesting to see what future academic research may find about 
the impact of women on the bench: whether there are substantive differences 
in their decision-making compared with their male counterparts or whether 
their presence impacts their male colleagues in any way. In any event, of course 
it makes a difference to have all sorts of judges such as those in this book 
because their backgrounds, opposition to the injustice of sexism in their legal 
careers, and their success produce different personalities. Justice Benjamin 
Cardozo observed in The Nature of the Judicial Process, “There is no guarantee of 
justice except the personality of the Judge.” 
While the rise in the prevalence of female judges and the authority they 
represent has increased in the past three decades, Hollywood seems to glimpse 
that public comfort may not have kept up. Widener Law School Professor 
Laura Krugman Ray’s article “From the Bench to the Screen: The Woman 
Judge in Film” (60 Clev. St. L. Rev. 681 (2012)) recaps seventy years of 
Hollywood’s conflicted portrayal as a “lingering discomfort with the notion of 
a woman wielding judicial power without having to compromise her personal 
life in return.” Even the “Judge Judy” television personalities shed no light on 
the relationship between the reality of women on the bench and that of their 
invented counterparts on the screen, and the real-life tension between “judicial 
authority and personal happiness.”  
In fact, to date, few movies portray the central character as a judge, female 
or male, and when they do the portrayal may not be all favorable—a Pyrrhic 
equality. 
Finally, the wisdom in Her Honor through real-life examples and voices will 
remain valuable even after all the “firsts” are filled, so long as that’s not the end 
of this long, overdue progression. Justice Ginsburg famously observed at her 
investiture and thereafter that the justice system “. . . will be poorer, in terms of 
appreciating what is at stake and the impact of its judgments, if all its members 
are cast from the same mold.”


Book Review of Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges

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