Women Role Models, Trailblazers to Receive ABA Honor
Professional excellence and trailblazing careers that women can role model are the characteristics that distinguish the five lawyers chosen as recipients of the 2010 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award from the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. The award recipients will receive their honors during an award ceremony and luncheon that will take place on Sunday, Aug. 8, at the Moscone Center during the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
The 2010 honorees are Brooksley Born of Washington, D.C., Elizabeth J. Cabraser of San Francisco, Willie Stevenson Glanton of Des Moines, M. Margaret McKeown of San Diego and Laura Stein of Oakland, Calif.
“From women’s rights activists on the grassroots level, to top level corporate executives and community leaders, these women lawyers are among this country’s finest role models befitting the spirit of the woman for whom the Brent Awards are named,” said Bobbi Liebenberg, chair of the ABA Commission on Women, referring to Margaret Brent, the first women lawyer in America who won every case during her eight-year legal career that began in 1638.
Liebenberg explains that the Brent Awards are more than an opportunity to honor the achievements of women lawyers. “While women in the law have made tremendous strides, they still lag men in pay, opportunity for advancement and in other measures. The Brent Awards shine a light on the roadmaps to success that up-and-coming women can follow.”
Biographies of the 2010 Brent Award honorees:
Brooksley E. Born of Washington, D.C. is a retired partner at Arnold & Porter LLP. A 1964 graduate of Stanford Law School, she was first in her class and president of the Stanford Law Review, the first woman to hold either distinction. She became a partner at Arnold & Porter in 1974 while working part-time in order to raise her five children. During the early 1970s, she taught some of the first classes on women in the law at Washington, D.C. law schools. Born helped start several women’s rights advocacy groups, including groups now known as the National Women’s Law Center and the National Partnership for Women & Families. She was the first woman appointed to the ABA Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which evaluates all nominees for federal judgeships. While on the committee, she testified in support of Sandra Day O’Connor’s qualification for an appointment to the United States Supreme Court. In 1996, President Bill Clinton appointed Born as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, where she fought for strong oversight of over-the-counter derivatives.
Elizabeth J. Cabraser of San Francisco is a founding partner of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP. She represents plaintiffs in complex civil litigation in the subject areas of mass tort, securities and investment fraud, environmental disaster, consumer, employment and product liability, and the pro bono representation of plaintiffs in civil rights and human rights litigation. She has served as lead counsel in national litigation involving Vioxx, the Ford Explorer, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, defective heart pacemakers, silicone gel breast implants and tobacco. Because of Cabraser’s leadership and advocacy, more than 40 percent of Lieff Cabraser’s partners are women, including almost the same in representation in the equity partnership. She was named by the National Law Journal as one of the “100 Most Influential Lawyers in America” in 2006, 2000 and 1997, and as one of the “50 Most Influential Women Lawyers in America” in 2007 and 1998. The California Daily Journal has consistently identified Cabraser as one of the “Top Women Litigators in California.”
Willie Stevenson Glanton of Des Moines is a former state legislator. She was the second African American woman admitted to the Iowa Bar and pioneered both the legal and political landscapes as Iowa’s first African American female assistant county attorney in 1956. She also was the first African American woman elected to the Iowa State Legislature in 1964 and the first African American woman elected president of the Iowa Chapter of the Federal Bar Association. In the 1960s, Glanton and her husband were sent by the U.S. State Department to Africa and Southeast Asia, where she studied laws and their application to women in these countries. She went on to become the first African American attorney at the U.S. Small Business Administration in 1966 and the first African American member of the Des Moines City Council on an interim basis in 1985. Glanton was selected as one of the ten “most influential black Iowans of the 20th century” by the Des Moines Register.
The Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of San Diego is a circuit judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She was the first woman partner at the law firm of Perkins Coie LLP in Seattle. Her areas of practice included complex commercial litigation, antitrust, intellectual property and constitutional law. She founded the intellectual property practice at Perkins Coie and was the first woman to serve on the firm’s executive committee and as managing director. She created the firm’s part-time lawyer program and its Saturday day care program in cooperation with the YMCA. McKeown was the founder and the first co-president of the statewide Washington Women Lawyers. She was the first woman to represent the Western District of Washington at the 9th Circuit Judicial Conference and served as the first woman president of the Federal Bar Association-Western District of Washington. McKeown was a member of the Ninth Circuit Gender Bias Task Force, the first federal gender-bias task force to be established. Throughout her nearly 12 years as a U.S. Circuit Court judge, she authored more than 300 opinions, including ones for cases on sex discrimination and female genital mutilation.
Laura Stein of Oakland, Calif., is vice president and general counsel of The Clorox Corporation with responsibility for the company’s worldwide legal, ethics and compliance, corporate secretary, corporate communication, crisis management, risk management and internal audit matters. Stein serves on the Clorox executive committee, chairs the Clorox women’s employee resource group, and co-sponsors the company’s social responsibility and enterprise risk management programs. Previously, Stein was senior vice president and general counsel of the H.J. Heinz Company, member of the Heinz senior management committee, director of the H.J. Heinz Company Foundation and president of the Heinz women’s group. She was the first woman general counsel at both of these Fortune 500 companies. Stein participates in the Diversity and Flexibility Connection of the Project for Attorney Retention and has previously served on the advisory boards of ABA DirectWomen and the ABA Center for Human Rights, among others. The National Law Journal has named her one of the 20 most influential general counsels in America. She has been named one of the “Bay Area’s Most Influential Women in Business” by the San Francisco Business Times and was previously named one of “Pennsylvania’s Best Women in Business” by Pennsylvania’s governor.
The ABA Women Lawyers of Achievement Award, 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.
Previous winners 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.
The Margaret Brent Awards program is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2010.
