Six Outstanding Women Lawyers to be Honored with Margaret Brent Awards

CHICAGO, Aug. 6, 2004 – The American Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession has chosen five women lawyers to receive its 2004 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Awards and a sixth to receive a special Margaret Brent Award. The awards will be presented during the ABA Annual Meeting, Sunday, Aug. 8, 11:30 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. in the Thomas B. Murphy Ballroom at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

This year’s winners are Marina Angel, Temple University School of Law professor; Teveia Rose Barnes, president of Lawyers for One America; Atlanta trial lawyer Linda Klein; Catherine A. Lamboley, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary of Shell Oil Company; and South Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Jean Hoefer Toal.

The sixth award will be presented to Hauwa Ibrahim, the Nigerian lawyer who led the globally-publicized legal struggle to save a fellow countrywoman sentenced to death by stoning for committing adultery.

The awards program, established in 1991, honors outstanding women lawyers who have achieved professional excellence in their area of specialty and have actively paved the way to success for others.

Marina Angel is a prolific legal scholar who has been lauded by the Pennsylvania Bar Association Commission on Women in the Profession for “three decades of dedication to the success of women lawyers and legal educators at the Temple University School of Law, in the Philadelphia legal community, throughout the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the nation.” Embarking on her career as a law professor in 1970, Angel developed a course on Women and the Law long before it was fashionable.

San Francisco lawyer Teveia Rose Barnes, is credited with creating Lawyers for One America, using her organizational skills, her commitment and her passion to mobilize a disparate group of lawyers into a cohesive force. The organization was created in response to former President Bill Clinton’s Call to Action to the Legal Profession to diversify its ranks and to increase the amount of pro bono legal services to underserved communities, especially programs providing assistance aimed at ensuring economic self-sufficiency.

Linda Klein is the first woman to serve as president of the State Bar of Georgia. Currently chair of the ABA Tort Trial and Insurance Practice Section, Klein is managing partner at Gambrell & Stolz in Atlanta, where her practice includes most types of business disputes, including contract law, construction law, fidelity and surety law, employment law and professional liability. In their endorsement of Klein’s nomination, the justices of the Supreme Court of Georgia wrote, “When severe cuts in federal funding endangered legal services for Georgia’s poor women and children, in particular victims of domestic violence, Ms. Klein brought together a coalition of 66 community organizations with the state, local and minority bar associations.”

Catherine A. Lamboley is the only woman to serve as general counsel of a major oil company in the United States, and one of the first women to have achieved the rank of corporate officer in a large company. Upon assuming her role at the helm of Shell Oil Company’s legal department in Houston, Lamboley started an initiative requiring key outside legal services providers to track and report the number of hours billed by women and people of color. At the end of the year, Shell presents the firms with a report card showing how they performed and measured up to other firms with comparable workloads.

Jean Hoefer Toal was the first woman to serve on the South Carolina Supreme Court. Praised by her colleagues for her “leadership skills in modernizing (revolutionizing is perhaps a better term) the South Carolina court system,” the former state legislator has been called “the leading force in equal rights for women.” In adding her stamp of approval, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Karen J. Williams said, “Jean Toal has to be recognized as the most important female in the last century in the state of South Carolina.”

Hauwa Ibrahim, currently serving as the Humphrey Fellow for American University College of Law in Washington, D.C., is the first female lawyer in northern Nigeria. She has defended nearly 50 cases involving Sharia, what she calls “a particularly virulent interpretation of the Islamic code,” calls for penalties such as death by stoning for having a child out of wedlock. Ibrahim holds degrees in both American and international law and has worked in both the private and public sectors including as consultant to the EU Commission in Nigeria.

The Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award is named for the first woman lawyer in America. She arrived in the colonies in 1638, and was involved in 124 court cases over the course of eight years, winning every case. In 1648 she formally demanded a “vote and voyce” in the Maryland Assembly, which the governor denied.

Previous winners of the Margaret Brent awards range from small-firm practitioners in Alabama and Alaska to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Winners are selected on the basis of their professional accomplishments and their role in opening doors for other women lawyers.

For more information on the 2004 Margaret Brent Awards, go to www.abanet.org/women/awards.

The ABA Commission on Women in the Profession was created by the association in 1987 to “secure the full and equal participation of women in the ABA, the legal profession and the justice system.” The 12-member commission is composed of lawyers and judges from around the country, and includes representatives from private practice, the judiciary, academia and corporations. The commission develops programs, policies and publications to advance and assist women lawyers, and educates the profession about work/family issues that affect all lawyers.

With more than 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law in a democratic society.