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Bancamper, Jennifer

DigitalCommons@NYLS 
NYLS Community News History & Archives 
3-10-2025 
Honoring Women’s History Month: NYLS Alumnae on the Bench 
Jennifer Bancamper 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/community_news 
Since 1891
WE ARE NEW YORK’S LAW SCHOOL
HON. FLORENCE ZIMMERMAN ’41 
One of the first women to graduate from NYLS, Hon. Florence Zimmerman ’41, served as an attorney for the NYC Rent and Housing 
Administration before being appointed a NYC Civil Court Judge in 1971 by Mayor John Lindsay. Judge Zimmerman served as President 
of the New York Women’s Bar Association from 1961 to 1962, making her the first of only two NYLS alumnae to hold this position.
HON. SYBIL HART KOOPER ’56
In 1985, Hon. Sybil Hart Kooper ’56 was appointed to the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Second Department, by 
Governor Mario Cuomo, serving until 1991. In 1992, the Brooklyn Women’s Bar Association (BWBA) established the Sybil Hart Kooper 
Award to recognize the valuable and significant contributions of outstanding BWBA members. A champion of women’s rights, Justice 
Kooper’s career highlights include:
•   Becoming the first female member of the Metropolitan Trial Lawyers Association
•   Co-founding and serving as President of the National Association of Women Judges
•   Serving as a member of the New York Task Force on Women in the Courts, which investigated gender bias in courtrooms
HON. SHEILA LEVITTAN ’56
Hon. Sheila Levittan ’56 was the first NYLS alumna to hold a judgeship, appointed to the NYC Civil Court in 1969 and the Criminal Court 
in 1970 by Mayor Lindsay. She later served as a New York State Supreme Court Justice from 1974 to 1991. During World War II, Justice 
Levittan participated in the Office of Strategic Services in Paris, London, and Germany.
HON. JUDITH SHEINDLIN ’65
Before Hon. Judith Sheindlin ’65 became the famous “Judge Judy,” she served on the bench of the NYC 
Family Court. She was first appointed by Mayor Ed Koch in 1982 and ascended to Supervising Judge of the 
Court’s Manhattan Division in 1986.
 
Honoring Women’s  
History Month: NYLS 
Alumnae on the Bench
Jennifer Bancamper  •  Published March 10, 2025
Throughout history, women in the legal profession have broken barriers to forge paths of 
excellence and leadership. In honor of Women’s History Month, New York Law School (NYLS) is 
celebrating a few of the School’s first alumnae who rose to judgeship and made history in New 
York courts, demonstrating groundbreaking achievements in the legal field.
The trailblazing contributions of these women serve as an inspiration to future generations of 
legal leaders. All of these judges—and many others—are immortalized in NYLS’s Hall of Judges, a 
tribute to NYLS alumni who have risen to judgeship.
WE ARE NEW YORK’S LAW SCHOOL
HON. JOAN B. CAREY ’66
Just two years after graduating from NYLS, Hon. Joan B. Carey ’66 became an Assistant District Attorney in Queens County, where she 
later made history as the first woman to serve as Bureau Chief of any District Attorney’s Office in the city. In 1997, Judge Carey received the 
President’s Special Award from the New York Women’s Bar Association. Past honorees include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, 
Judith Kaye, Governor Ann Richards, and Anita Hill. Judge Carey’s judicial appointments include:
•  Judge of the NYC Criminal Court, 1978; Supervising Judge, 1979
•   Supreme Court Justice by Designation, New York County Supreme Court, Criminal Term
•  Judge of the Court of Claims, 1987
•   Administrative Judge of the New York County Supreme Court, Criminal Term, 1993
•  Administrative Judge of the NYC Criminal Court, 1995
•  Deputy Chief Administrative Judge of all NYC courts, 1996
•   Administrative Judge of the New York County Supreme Court, Civil Branch, 2009
HON. LORRAINE MILLER ’68
An expert on housing law, Hon. Lorraine Miller ’68 was a lifelong advocate for affordable housing. In addition to helping develop city-aided 
apartment projects, Justice Miller drafted the legislation that created the NYC Housing Court in 1973 and was subsequently appointed as 
Judge of the Court. She was later appointed a justice of the New York Supreme Court in 1991.
HON. BARBARA NEWMAN ’71
Prior to her judicial career, Hon. Barbara Newman ’71 served as an Assistant District Attorney in the Kings County District Attorney’s 
Office and later as Chief of the Sex Crimes and Special Victims Bureau. In 1988, Justice Newman was appointed by Mayor Koch to the 
New York County Criminal Court, where she served until 1997 when she was appointed to the Bronx County Supreme Court, Criminal 
Term. She became a certificated Justice of the Court in 2011, after having served as an acting justice since 2007.
HON. CAROLYN DEMAREST ’72
Hon. Carolyn Demarest ’72 served as Assistant Chief of the Appeals Division of the NYC Corporation Counsel before being appointed to 
the NYC Family Court by Mayor Koch in 1985. Five years later, Governor Cuomo appointed her to the Kings County Supreme Court, where 
she subsequently won reelection twice. Justice Demarest was one of two jurists designated to develop the Court’s Commercial Division 
and served as its Presiding Justice from its inception in 2002 through 2016.
HON. UTE LALLY ’72
A German immigrant, Hon. Ute Lally ’72’s judicial career began in 1986 when she was elected as a judge for the Nassau County District 
Court. After a decade of service, she was elected to the Nassau County Supreme Court in the 10th Judicial District. Justice Lally received 
many honors throughout her career, including:
•  The Governor’s Award for Excellence in 2000
•   The Officer’s Cross of Merit, First Class, from the Federal Republic of Germany in 2001
•   The Woman of the Year Award from the Fraternal Order of Court Officers in 2007
•   The Woman of the Year Award from the NYC Fire Fighters Steuben Association in 2008
HON. JANICE VOLKMAN ’75
Shortly after graduating from NYLS, Hon. Janice Volkman ’75 co-founded a women-run law firm that took cases 
from a constellation of organizations such as Women Organized Against Rape, Women Against Abuse, and the 
Women’s Law Project. Judge Volkman later worked for the Veteran’s Administration and the Equal Employment 
Opportunity Commission before becoming a federal Administrative Law Judge for the Social Security 
Administration.
WE ARE NEW YORK’S LAW SCHOOL
Find more NYLS stories at news.nyls.edu.
HON. SARAH S. CURLEY ’77
Hon. Sarah S. Curley ’77 was the first woman appointed to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of 
Arizona in 1986 and the first woman to hold the position of Chief Bankruptcy Judge. Judge Curley also served 
as an officer, director, and board member of the National Association of Women Judges. In 2023, she received 
the American Inns of Court Bankruptcy Distinguished Service Award.
HON. KATHRYN FREED ’77
While she was a student at NYLS, Hon. Kathryn Freed ’77 was inspired to explore government. She went 
on to serve as counsel for the New York State Assembly’s Committees on Higher Education, Authorities and 
Commissions, and Environmental Protection before joining the New York City Council in 1992. Her judicial career 
began in 2004 when she became a judge for the NYC Criminal Court. She was appointed Acting Justice of the 
New York County Supreme Court in 2012. 
HON. JUDITH REICHLER ’77
In the mid-1980s, Hon. Judith Reichler ’77 helped draft what eventually became New York State’s Child Support Standard Act, which 
redefined child support in the state. She subsequently became Director of the New York State Commission on Child Support and joined 
Judith S. Kaye’s Family Violence Task Force.


English

Honoring Women’s History Month: NYLS Alumnae on the Bench

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Professor Brook at table in faculty library, 4th floor of C building, with students

Leonard, Arthur S.

DigitalCommons@NYLS 
Other Publications Faculty Scholarship 
4-23-2025 
SCOTUS Likely to Rule for Parents in Dispute Over LGBTQ-themed 
Books in Maryland 
Arthur S. Leonard 
Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/fac_other_pubs 
SCOTUS likely to rule for parents in dispute
over LGBTQ-themed books in Maryland
By Arthur S. Leonard Posted on April 23, 2025
The US Supreme Court.
JOE RAVI/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS CC-BY-SA 3.0
The US Supreme Court heard arguments on April 22 in Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which a
group of parents of elementary school students in the Montgomery County School
District in Maryland are challenging the district’s decision to deny parents the right to
have advance notice and “opt out” their children from lessons in pre-K through grade 5
that use books that include LGBTQ characters and touch on LGBTQ issues, such as same-
sex marriage, Pride parades, and childhood same-sex crushes.
In October 2022, the school board announced that it was adding a collection of story
books to its elementary school curriculum that would touch on LGBTQ issues, having
decided that the existing curriculum did not adequately reflect the diversity of family life
within the large school district, which has more than 200 schools and more than 160,000
students, of which at that time more than 70,000 were attending the elementary
schools.  
The board released the titles of the books publicly. At that time, the district had a policy
of informing parents when lessons would take place that might raise issues and allowing
parents to “opt out” their children from lessons that they found objectionable based on
their own religious beliefs. Maryland state law encourages school districts to have such
policies, although it doesn’t require them. The school board also directed that these books
should be used as age appropriate for the specified grades, even though during the book
selection and vetting process some teachers and principals had expressed disagreement
about their age appropriateness. The board did not want the books just to sit on the shelf,
but specifically directed that they be used in lessons with the students, as part of the
English language curriculum for the elementary grades.
Some parents opposed the use of these books in lessons with their children, and the
school board claimed that it received so many requests to “opt out” students that it
became “unfeasible” to continue the advance notice and “opt-out” policy, and abruptly
dropped the policy without explanation. This prompted three families of varying Muslim
and Christian faiths to file a federal lawsuit claiming a violation of the parents’ and
students’ free exercise and free speech rights under the First Amendment, the parents’
substantive due process rights under the 14th Amendment, and Maryland law. They are
represented by Eric Baxter and the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which frequently
represents opponents of LGBTQ rights.
Their case was assigned to District Judge Deborah Boardman, an appointee of President
Joseph R. Biden, Jr. Along with their complaint, they moved for a preliminary injunction
seeking to restore the prior advance notice and “opt-out” policy while the case was
pending. Judge Boardman denied that motion on August 24, 2023. The plaintiffs
appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, where a three-judge panel voted
2-1 to affirm Judge Boardman’s denial of the motion. The opinion for the panel majority
was written by Judge G. Steven Agee, who was appointed by President George W. Bush,
and was joined by Judge DeAndrea Benjamin, who was appointed by President Biden.
The dissenter was Judge A. Marvin Quattlebaum, Jr., who was appointed by President
Donald J. Trump, and who argued that the board should have followed its existing opt-
out policy to accommodate the religious beliefs of the parents.  
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The attention focused on this case, particularly by those concerned with “religious
freedom,” has been intense, as signified by the long list of amicus curiae (“friend of the
court”) briefs filed (65), and by the Trump administration’s putting its thumb on the
scales by sending Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris to make an
argument on behalf of the government, supporting the plaintiffs, sending a particular
signal to the three Trump appointees on the bench.
The essence of the district court and panel decisions, based on decades of Supreme Court
and federal appellate precedents, was that courts should generally defer to the curricular
decisions of school boards.  Much of that litigation was focused on charges that school
boards were engaged in impermissible censorship when they removed books from school
library collections because the books had become controversial.  The issue of advance
notice and opt-outs due to parents’ religious beliefs is a relatively new one, at least on this
scale, and there is not so much appellate precedent, but what there is has tended to
support the school districts’ decisions.
However, this comes up against the recent trajectory of the Supreme Court’s Free
Exercise decisions, which show a steady movement towards expanding the rights of
people with religious objections winning exceptions from complying with laws or school
district rules.  In the area of LGBTQ rights, this most famously includes such decisions
as Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative, both of which were referred to during the
April 22 hearing, where businesses whose owners had religious objections were seeking
exceptions to a Colorado anti-discrimination law when it came to individually designed
wedding cakes or wedding websites, but the scope of religious exceptionalism has been
wide-ranging beyond that, to the point where expanding free exercise of religion has
become a signal goal of the conservative justices of the Court.
Judge Boardman’s denial of the preliminary injunction was in line with existing cases, as
reflected in the Fourth Circuit panel’s majority decision, but Judge Quattlebaum’s dissent
seemed more in tune with where the Supreme Court conservatives are heading on
religious exceptionalism, so it was not particularly surprising when the Supreme Court
announced that it would review the case.
Technically, the issue before the Supreme Court is whether Judge Boardman abused her
discretion in rejecting the motion for preliminary injunction on the grounds she cited,
which was her conclusion that the plaintiffs were unlikely to be successful in proving that
the school district’s policy violates their constitutional rights. Technically, what is at stake
on this appeal is not a ruling by the Supreme Court on whether the parents have a right to
restoration of the advance notice and opt-out policy, but rather whether the parents have
a strong enough constitutional argument to justify the extraordinary step of ordering
restoration of that policy while the litigation is pending, before there has been pre-trial
discovery and a final ruling on the merits of their claim by the district court based on a
fully-developed record.
Listening to the oral argument recording, which can be heard on supremecourt.gov, one
could conclude that members of the court, especially the conservative members who hold
a 6-3 majority, were really focused on the merits, as to which they sympathized with the
plaintiffs. Chief Justice John R. Roberts, Jr., who is sometimes the “swing vote,”
occasionally siding with the three Democratic appointees — Justices Sonia Sotomayor,
Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — did not speak very frequently during the
argument, leaving most of the heavy questioning to Justice Samuel Alito, who is the
Court’s most outspoken proponent of a very broad free exercise right. Justice Clarence
Thomas, who is generally considered the most conservative justice, and Justices Neil
Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were also very active questioners.  
The issues that seemed to most inflame the conservatives were cherry-picked quotes from
one or two of the books, the fact that the district had used advance notice and opt-outs
for many years before abandoning that policy, that the abrupt change of the policy was
not publicly explained or justified apart from the vague assertion that it quickly became
unfeasible to administer after the LGBTQ book collection was announced, and that it
appears that many other school districts around the country have long had opt-out
policies for parents with religious objections and seemed to find them possible to
administer.
The school district’s attorney, Alan E. Schoenfeld, a partner at WilmerHale LLP, a major
national law firm, was well prepared with answers on some of these issues, but for many
of them the factual record before the trial court in deciding the preliminary injunction
motion is rather threadbare. For example, there was no evidence about how many
parents had sought opt-outs compared to earlier experience, or about the numbers faced
by other school districts in administering their opt-out policies. Schoenfeld pointed out
that if large numbers of students are “opted out,” an absenteeism issue is created, and the
school also has to come up with alternative rooms and people to supervise while these
elementary school students are away from their classrooms.  
If large numbers of students get up to walk out when the LGBTQ books are being used,
that also sends a message to the other students who remain in the class. One of the school
board’s motivations for introducing the LGBTQ books into the curriculum was to make
students who might identify as LGBTQ or have LGBTQ parents, siblings, or friends feel
welcome and represented, which would be undercut by a sudden exodus of other
students from the classroom when any of these books are discussed. There was lots of
factual speculation during the argument, which is not surprising when the appeal is being
taken from a preliminary injunction ruling when there hasn’t yet been a trial on the
merits.
Judge Boardman concluded, based on what she heard from the parties up to that point
and after examining the books that were singled out by the plaintiffs as objectionable,
that the school board’s use of the storybooks did not cross some line from “permissible
influence” to “potentially impermissible indoctrination,” that students were not likely to
be “coerced” in their religious beliefs by reading these books, that the parents were not
being “coerced” in their religious beliefs, and that the school board’s reasons for adding
the books to the curriculum were “rational” and legitimate.
This stimulated some argument among the lawyers and the justices about whether these
were the appropriate tests, whether this case was about mere “exposure” to the books as
opposed to the books and the teacher signaling a pro-LGBTQ point of view from which
the parents asserted a right to shield their impressionable children.  In other words, a
substantial, and sometimes heated, argument was taking place about what the legal
standards should be.  
Attorney Schoenfeld pointed out that a decision by the court for the parents would
significantly change the legal status quo on this issue, and likely lead to an upsurge in
parental requests for “opt-outs” that would significantly change public education in this
country.  Whether that prospect would give pause to the Court’s conservatives is an open
question.
Justice Kagan was particularly insistent on the need to do some “line-drawing” between
what is or is not permissible when the school is presenting material to students that
parents find interfering with their attempt to imbue their children with the parents’
religious mindset, and several of the conservative justice cast aspersions on the argument
that parents with religious objections could enroll their children in religious schools,
when such an option might not be affordable for them and shouldn’t be required in a
state where taxes are extracted from the public with the promise of a free public
education.  
In the end, a listener familiar with the trends in Supreme Court decision-making under
the Free Exercise Clause was likely to conclude that there was not a majority on the court
that would affirm Judge Boardman and the Fourth Circuit panel, although sometimes
one ends up being surprised about how the Supreme Court comes down in controversial
cases.
Some suspense certainly remains after this argument.  The case should be decided by the
end of the Supreme Court’s term in June or early July.


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Honoring Women’s History Month: NYLS Alumnae on the Bench

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