ABA Senior Lawyers Division

Women Trailblazers in the Law

ORAL HISTORY

of

LOIS SCHIFFER

Interviewer: Katherine J. Henry

Dates of Interviews:

April 13, 2006 October 12, 2006 October 19, 2006 February 29, 2008 November 13, 2008 January 11, 2010 January 11, 2011

ORAL HISTORY OF LOIS SCHIFFER

FIRST INTERVIEW

April 13, 2006

Ms. Henry: Commission on Women in the Profession taping Lois Schiffer's personal

history. We are in her office in Washington, D.C. My name is Katherine

Henry. I am the interviewer and Lois Schiffer is the interviewee. Good

morning Lois.

Ms. Schiffer: Hello.

Ms. Henry: Lois, what we'd like to do is start with your early childhood history. Can you

tell us where you were born?

Ms. Schiffer: I was born in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Henry: So you're a local girl.

Ms. Schiffer: I'm a native.

Ms. Henry: Ok. What can you tell me about your early years in Washington?

Ms. Schiffer: I think it's interesting to take a step back and see how my family came to

Washington.

Ms. Henry: Sure.

Ms. Schiffer: To start out with, all of my grandparents immigrated to the United States from

different countries in Eastern Europe. My mother's mother and father went to

Boston and my mother grew up in Boston. My father's parents came to New

York and my father grew up in New York. Both of my parents grew up very

much feeling that they were poor children of immigrants who were given

great opportunity through the public education system in our country. My

mother went to public schools in Brockton and then in Roxbury, both near

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Boston or in Boston. It was when she was in high school that a teacher said to

her, that she seemed like a smart person and she actually could go to college.

And I remember that my mother told us that she had to take lots of years of

Latin [laughing] all at the same time and was quite firm that I take Latin in

junior high school as a result of that. But really through a combination of

being very capable and working hard and the help of this teacher, my mother

went to Radcliffe College on scholarship and lived at home. Boston, unlike

New York, had no real public universities so that a few lucky and able people

got to go to some of the private colleges. She was always very proud that she

had gone to Radcliffe and that figured eventually in my life as well.

My father went to Stuyvesant High School in New York and then to CCNY

and it was a similar story. He was plainly very smart and able and had the

opportunity for an education. Then each of them separately -- they didn't

know each other then -- came to Washington during the 1930s. They took the

Civil Service exam and through merit selection, could come to work for the

federal government. I point that out because all of this history eventually

come back to be a significant part of my life. They met in Washington and

both of them worked for the government for a while. My father eventually

left and went to a private company. My mother went in and out of work. But

much of her work life was working for the federal government. The

government provided a very important opportunity for both of them. So they

came to be in Washington as a result of their working, and like many people

of their generation, they stayed and raised a family and that's how I came to

be born in the 1945 in Washington. My mother used to say I was born six

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weeks before Roosevelt died. It took me a while to realize that I also was

born while World War II was going on because the Roosevelt focus was much

more significant.

Ms. Henry: Now, were you a first child, second child, only child?

Ms. Schiffer: I was the first of four. I have a sister Nancy who is two years younger than I

am, a sister Susan who was born in 1951, and then a brother Alan who was

born in 1954. My sister Susan, my brother Alan and I all continue to live in

Washington. My sister Nancy went to the University of Wisconsin and stayed

in Wisconsin.

Ms. Henry: So you were born in Washington in 1945 during World War II.

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: Was your father, did he do any military service?

Ms. Schiffer: He did not. He worked for the Federal Power Commission on issues related

to natural gas and utility rate making.

Ms. Henry: What are your earliest memories of Washington?

Ms. Schiffer: My first memory, at least as I reconstruct it, is of playing in, what was then

called Meridian Hill Park, which was the park right across from the apartment

building where we lived on Fifteenth Street. And we went there quite

regularly. My parents took me to Meridian Hill Park and I remember playing

in that park probably when I was two or three.

Ms. Henry: And then did you go to pre-school in Washington?

Ms. Schiffer: I did. I think pre-school wasn't so common in those days, but I went to a

nursery school that was in our neighborhood. I remember that, but I don't

have very clear memories of pre-school.

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Ms. Henry: And do you remember when your sister Nancy was born?

Ms. Schiffer: I don't remember precisely, but I remember when she was small.

Ms. Henry: And what about, as you had your other siblings come along, do you have any

recollections of that part of your life, as they became part of the family?

Ms. Schiffer: I very much remember when Susan was born. We were all born in the same

hospital, which was then called Garfield Hospital. It has now been

demolished. But it was on U Street near the old, what was the old Children's

Hospital. And when Susan was born, my mother was in the hospital for, I

don't know, it seemed like a long time. It was probably four or five days. We

would go to the hospital but then we had to stay downstairs while my father

went upstairs to see her. So I was old enough by then to have a pretty clear

memory of that. After Susan was born and came home, we continued to live

in the apartment building where we had lived, but by the time Susan was

about one, we moved to a house. We were actually quite a large family to be

living in an apartment building at that point. So we moved to a different

location.

Ms. Henry: Where was your house?

Ms. Schiffer: The apartment building, as I said, was on Fifteenth Street and the house was in

Chevy Chase, DC on a street called Patterson Street, quite near Lafayette

School.

Ms. Henry: And how long did you live in that house?

Ms. Schiffer: My mother stills lives there. [My mother died in April 2009]. I lived there

the whole time I was growing up.

Ms. Henry: So that was your childhood home.

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Ms. Schiffer: It was, although I have clear memories of Fifteenth Street and I went through

second grade living on Fifteenth Street. I started third grade at Lafayette.

Ms. Henry:

Now what about things you liked to do that you can recall doing, say before

you started school. What kind of activities? Did your parents take you to

museums, what are the sorts of things you remember doing?

Ms. Schiffer: I remember liking to read. I always liked to read and I probably learned to

read pretty early though I can't put a finger on when. We certainly went to

the zoo. We went to Gifford's for ice cream that was a big event. There was

a Gifford's in those days both in Bethesda and in Silver Spring and it was an

excursion to go. We went to Beltsville which gives us sony, perspective on

how time passes -- in those days the Department of Agriculture had an

experimental station in Beltsville, which seemed very far away. We used to

go to see the goats and other animals at Beltsville. We went on car rides.

That was a big adventure. [Laughter] A big way my family spent time on the

weekends was to take a ride and then to take a picnic.

Ms. Henry: You mean car rides?

Ms. Schiffer: Car rides, right. Rides in the car. That was an activity in those days. My

mother's mother lived in Boston and we went many summers on car rides to

visit my grandmother in Boston. I'm sure that we went to museums but I

don't have a particular memory of it.

Ms. Henry: And then you started, you went to pre-school, which you said was unusual at

that time. And then from there to school?

Ms. Schiffer: From there I went to Georgetown Day School for kindergarten and first grade.

My birthday was in February and the cutoff for public school was January and

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so my parents had me go to kindergarten and first grade in private school so

that I could start school earlier.

Ms. Henry: Do you have any recollections of Georgetown Day School?

Ms. Schiffer: I remember liking it. I'm sure I was a good student, and that was probably

part of it. I made a friend there who continues to be a friend of mine. She

was then Emily Lebowitz, now Emily Olbrich. I have a mental picture of

what the building looked like and the place looked like. I certainly enjoyed

school.

Ms. Henry: And then after you completed first grade at Georgetown Day School, where

did you go?

Ms. Schiffer: In second grade, I went to H.D. Cook Elementary School, near Meridian Hill

Park. I remember that my teacher was Mrs. Pitzer. 1 don't know why I

remember that, but 1 do. 1 remember being quite, I don't know what the word

is, concerned, because we were reading the same books in second grade that I

had already read in first grade. I have a mental picture of where preschool

was, but I don't have too many other memories of it. We had some children

of military people in my class who were bused to the school. In retrospect, it

was because there was a large concentration of military people in the

Washington area and the school system wanted to be sure that they were

spread around among the schools. I don't have much more memory of second

grade than that.

Ms. Henry: And you remember Mrs. Pitzer. Do you remember any women that were

particularly influential during these early years as you were growing?

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Ms. Schiffer: My mother, certainly. It's an interesting story. My parents had a number of

friends, many of whom worked for the government, and we knew them. It

turned out I learned much later in life that at least one them was a women

lawyer, but of course at the time I had no clue. To say were they influential -

I was too little. I didn't really know what my parents friends did. There were

certainly teachers who were influential along the way, but I would not say that

the teachers that I had in those early years were among them.

Ms. Henry: So, what . . . you were at, I'm sorry, what was the name of the elementary

school you were in?

Ms. Schiffer: H.D. Cook.

Ms. Henry: That's what I have here, H.D. Cook. And how long were you at H.D. Cook?

Ms. Schiffer: Just for a year.

Ms. Henry: And then?

Ms. Schiffer: Then we moved and I started Lafayette and I was at Lafayette from third

through sixth grades. It's also interesting to note, although we weren't

particularly aware of it, that in Washington, D.C., the schools were race

segregated by law. Of course it was during my third and fourth grade years,

that Brown vs. Board was decided and the D.C. schools became desegregated.

In my family, nobody ever would have made a point of the segregation since

my parents were very strongly opposed to it. The truth of it is that even after

Brown, when the D.C. schools did race desegregate, I continued to be in

classes with virtually no black students, as a function of housing

discrimination and other things as well, but we were oblivious at the time.

Again, as an adult, in retrospect its interesting to me to note that I was plainly

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in school, and in a school system, where the companion case to Brown made a

significant difference.

Ms. Henry: And it's interesting that, at least for you, it didn't have that much of an impact

because the school composition didn't change.

Ms. Schiffer: That's right.

Ms. Henry: Now, what about outside of school? Was your family active in any kind of

religion? Did you go to church, synagogue, anything like that?

Ms. Schiffer: We were Jewish and we knew we were Jewish. I went to Sunday School from

second or third grade on, and then it eventually became Hebrew School. I

didn't mach care for it. I'm sure it was partly the way the classes were taught

and partly that I didn't feel a particularly integral part of the classes that I was

in. We weren't particularly observant; my parents didn't go to synagogue.

We did participate in seders but religion was not, a major force in my life.

Ms. Henry:

You said that you didn't feel like you were integrated into the class. Could

you explain that to me?

Ms. Schiffer: I didn't feel a part of the class. The people who were my friends from regular

school weren't the people who were in my Sunday School class. Hebrew

school was less intellectual than I might have liked even when I was pretty

young.

Ms. Henry: Did your gender have any impact on that?

Ms. Schiffer: It was certainly true that there were very much two tiers of participation in

Sunday School. The boys were on a track to be bar mitzvahed and for the

girls that was unheard of. Its hard to convey how unheard of it was. We

were on a track to be confirmed - a longer and less glamorous process. And

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frankly, you learned a lot less. But I don't know that I was so conscious of the

fact that there were these two tiers. Though, of course, in retrospect, it seems

completely obvious. [Laughter]. Of course in regular school, where I was

having a lot of academic success, I didn't sense at that age any distinction

based on the fact that I was a girl.

Ms. Henry: And there were boys and girls in your grade school.

Ms. Schiffer: Yes. I always went to sex - integrated classes.

Ms. Henry: So you were a Lafayette from third through sixth grades, and then you went to

another school after that?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes. Lafayette was an elementary school. In the D.C. school system junior

high school went from 7 through 9 and high school from 10th through 12th

grades. I went to Alice Deal Junior High School and then Woodrow Wilson

High School.

Ms. Henry: So what were the names of these schools?

Ms. Schiffer: Alice Deal, D-E-A-L. And Woodrow Wilson High School. They were the

neighborhood schools. In those days D.C. was pretty much a neighborhood

school system.

Ms. Henry: And these were public schools.

Ms. Schiffer: They were all public schools, right.

Ms. Henry: And did most of your friends also go to public school at the time?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: Did your family ever consider . . . it sounds like with your intellectual gifts,

did your family ever consider putting you in private school?

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Ms. Schiffer: Not that I'm particularly aware of other than that I had gone to private school

in those early two years. In those days, there were lots and lots of very able

students in the public schools and while my public school experience was not

the most intellectually stimulating, it was fine. Certainly the student body had

many intellectually gifted students, There were plenty of smart kids in public

school.

Ms. Henry: And what sort of activities did you engage in? Were you in, participate in any

clubs or teams, sports teams, anything like that?

Ms. Schiffer: I was not much of an athlete and of course those were the days long before

Title IX, so girls weren't particularly encouraged to be athletes. Although I

did get a high school sports letter [laughter], much to my amazement and that

of everyone else. I got points for refereeing and other kinds of non- physical

activities. I was in many clubs throughout junior high school and high school.

I was very active in the school newspaper, which was actually an academic

course, where I was eventually the second in charge editor - the managing

editor. I'll come back to that in a moment. I was in the French Club at some

point; and the Latin Club; the Future Teach as of America Club; there's was

something called Junior Town Meeting League, which was a public affairs

and debating club. I was in just a raft of activities. I was quite active. The

high school newspaper, called the Beacon, was a significant experience to me,

and the group of people who were involved in the newspaper were among my

close friends. I started working on the Beacon in 10th grade. I took a course

in journalism, which was part of participating on the Beacon. The teacher

who ran the school newspaper was named Dr. Boyle, and she was tough, but

5847v1

10-

Ms. Henry:

she was very strong and it was a really excellent and quite award-winning

student newspaper. It's interesting that I was a strong candidate to be editor-

in-chief of the Beacon, and was passed over for somebody else. I never

understood it at the time, but in retrospect I believe it was because he was a

boy and I was a girl.

I was going to ask that question. [Laughter]

Ms. Schiffer: But I would say in general, we were quite oblivious to any differences in

treatment in those days. But that's one thing where I never quite understood

why it was that I wasn't editor-in-chief Of course, the person who was

picked over me was later in my law school class and is somebody I m still in

touch with. Working on the school newspaper was a very important activity

to me.

Ms. Henry: Do you recall covering any particular stories or anything that stands out in

your mind from that period?

Ms. Schiffer: I have to say I don't particularly.

Ms. Henry: And you mentioned that you did get a sports letter. Was that unusual for girls

to do at the time?

Ms. Schiffer: It was certainly unusual for the intellectual girls. There were girls who were

involved in athletics. But I don't have a general sense of it.

Ms. Henry: And you said you refereed. What kind of sports?

Ms. Schiffer: I don't remember that.

Ms. Henry: Because your focus was more on intellectual activities?

Ms. Schiffer: It was definitely much more on intellectual activities. There were a group of

us who thought of ourselves as the smart, thoughtful students, and that was

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very much my focus. Actually, there came a time my senior year in high

school when I won an award that was counter to these intellectual activities

and it was a source of great embarrassment to me, although now it's of course

a very funny story. I was selected in my senior year in high school to be the

third place national winner in the Betty Crocker search for the Future

Homemaker of Tomorrow. [Laughter]. But that came about because we all

took three days of gym and two days of hygiene and my hygiene teacher was

quite insistent that if we were going to pass hygiene, we needed to take the

Betty Crocker test. It turned out that she had gone on the Betty Crocker trip

with a student from a private school, so she was familiar with the fact that she

could win a trip for herself if her students did well. So I took the Betty

Crocker test and I was a good test taker -- I didn't know much about

homemaking, but I was a quite good test taker. I had one of the top five

scores in my state, which was the District of Columbia, a quite small state.

And from that the program looked at your activities and school standing, so I

became my state's winner. With my hygiene teacher, Mrs. Ogilvy, I won an

all expense paid trip to Washington, D.C. But also to the Waldorf Astoria in

New York and to Williamsburg, Virginia, where we were given colonial ball

gowns for the event. Throughout the course of the trip, people from Science

Research Associates, the testing agency talked to us in large and small groups,

and through that process I became the third place national winner.

Interestingly, although I cannot be certain I was convinced that one of the

ways that I became the third place national winner is that we had what we

would now call a focus group discussion and the hypothetical was that

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somebody had been the science teacher in a small town. Then fell off for

some reason. The potential substitute had a child and was ambivalent about

working. What should she do? Who knew how I thought this up — I said: she

was in a good position to bargain and she could come back part-time. And

I'm just convinced [laughter] that answer had something to do with my being

the third place national winner. I did get a substantial scholarship from that

success. On the other hand I was mortified, because here was I, this smart,

intellectual kid with this "Betty Crocker" award. On the all expense paid trip

were several people who have actually been long-time friends of mine. They

included a friend who I had no other way to know, and for years when people

would ask us how we knew each other, it was an awkward moment, because

neither of us wanted to say "because we were Betty Crocker future

homemakers." That's a roundabout way of saying that I very much saw

myself as in the intellectual crowd and not in the homemaker crowd.

Ms. Henry:

Did you have some sense of what you wanted to do in the future, that you

wanted to go to college that you maybe wanted to work during those years?

Ms. Schiffer: From the day I was born, I knew I wanted to go to college because my mother,

as I mentioned, had gone to Radcliffe and was quite firm about the fact that

she would like to see her daughter go to Radcliffe. So I always knew from a

young age that I would go to college, not necessarily Radcliffe. All of my

siblings understood that the expectation in our family was that one would go

to college. On the other hand, I didn't see so much of what the work

opportunities were. The adults I knew worked for the Government or were

teachers. And so, from some time in high school, I always thought that I

15847v I -13-

wanted to be a teacher. Again, in retrospect, that's what I saw and that's what

I knew. It really wasn't until my sophomore year in college, when somebody,

a friend who had been a senior in my dorm when I was a freshman, went on to

Harvard Law School, I saw that a woman could be a lawyer. My junior year,

when I came to be in the student government, I saw that I could actually do

some of these organizing activities pretty well. Also in my junior year I was

dating a man who was in the process of applying to law school. It was that

combination that led me to law school. But it was far from my mind as even a

possibility before that.

Ms. Henry: But it certainly was understood that you would go to college and education

was highly valued in your family. Just because a lot of people won't know

about this, Betty Crocker search for Future Homemaker of America, which is

really quite unusual.

Ms. Schiffer: Very funny.

Ms. Henry: Can you tell us a little more about what the Betty Crocker search was looking

for?

Ms. Schiffer: It's a little hard to say what they were looking for. The test was 150 questions

in 30 minutes, with nothing off for wrong answers. So they plainly were

looking for someone who would know how to take a test. The questions ran

the gamut. There were math questions; how much carpet in a 3 by 5 room? I

knew math. There were questions about sewing. I actually knew how to sew.

There were questions about which is the cheapest cut of meat - I didn't have

the vaguest idea, but there was no penalty for guessing, so I guessed. There

was a ten-minute essay on compromise in marriage, a topic on which I was a

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world expert at age seventeen. I really had to focus on making my

handwriting legible. So, I don't really know what they were looking for - for

some combination of smarts and connections to community, activity in the

community. Beyond that, I just don't know.

Ms. Henry: What was your essay on compromise in marriage about?

Ms. Schiffer: I haven't a clue [laughing]. I think it was some version of compromise the

little things, not the big things, but I really don't know. It was open only to

girls. I also believe in retrospect, though we had no idea at the time, that the

search was race-segregated. Since I was in Washington, D.C., race

segregation would have limited the pool, but I don't really know that about the

search. In later years, the Betty Crocker contests made a point of the fact that

they picked the first African-American. And then the fact that they opened it

up to boys. Betty Crocker used the search for promotional purposes. The

company did give out a lot of scholarship money through the search and

provided a lot of opportunity. There were plenty of people on my trip who

had never been on an airplane before, or who came from states where they had

never been out of the state. Of course, I had never been west of Pennsylvania

either. There was a newsletter for a while, sort — an informal newsletter

among some of the award recipients. You will be surprised to learn that a few

other people that you know and love were Betty Crockers too. Linda

Greenhouse comes to mind. The big activities for me were also the high

school newspaper, and some of the discussion groups.

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Ms. Henry: Now we've talked about junior high and high school a bit, and all the activity

that you engaged in. Did you, when you graduated, did you go on a high

school trip with your class? Do you remember anything like that?

Ms. Schiffer: We didn't have a high school class trip. Of course we were in Washington,

D.C., the mecca of high school trips. We had a couple of trips with various

journalism people. The editors of the school newspaper went to a program at

Washington and Lee University in Virginia. We may have had a journalism

group trip to New York.

Ms. Henry: Now we haven't talked much about growing up with your brothers and sister.

Can you talk about that a little bit? What you recollect of that before your

college years?

Ms. Schiffer: My sister Nancy and I were relatively close in age and did activities together.

She picked up the activities where I didn't do so well, so that she was very

good at art, which was something that I had no talent for and didn't

particularly interest me. My sister Susan was enough younger -- she was six

years younger, that, in some ways she seemed to be in a somewhat different

universe. All four of us went on trips together with our parents - we have

photos of those activities. My brother was just a cute kid who was quite a bit

younger than I was, when I was growing up. I thought of him as a small child.

Ms. Henry:

You said your mother worked pretty much on and off as you were growing

up?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: How did that affect your upbringing?

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Ms. Schiffer: My mother worked until I was born and then thought she would stop working.

That stop lasted about seven months, and then she went back to work for the

government on issues related to children's health. She worked through the

time my sister Susan was born, and she did stop working for about ten years.

But she was always actively involved in activities like the League of Women

Voters. As a kid, I didn't make a big distinction between her working at a

paid job and working at those kinds of activities. My father worked for the

Government through the time I was seven or so, then went to work for a

private company where he was a consultant on natural gas rate-making, and

he traveled a fair amount. He was gone for several weeks at a stretch. That

had an effect on me that he wasn't around as much as I might have liked.

When he was home, he was very helpful with math homework and things like

that and of course took us on excursions too.

Ms. Henry: Would you describe your mother as a strong role model for you?

Ms. Schiffer: Certainly.

Ms. Henry: And were most of your friends' mothers also either working or very active as

your mother were, or did they tend to be homemakers? Was there some

distinction, or was everybody about the same?

s. Schiffer: Certainly there were some distinction and certainly I had friends whose

mothers were home all the time. Some of their mothers would be available at

school, and I did not like it when my mother wasn't available at school.

Ms. Henry:

Katherine Henry. I'm here with Lois Schiffer. Lois, we were just talking

about your years up to college. And I wanted to ask you about some of the

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Ms. Schiffer:

strong women in your life, who influenced you. In addition to your mom,

who played an important role.

My mother was plainly influential. I certainly would say that I had some

teachers along the way who influenced me. My Latin teacher in eighth and

ninth grade was Miss Beall. And she was quite a strong teacher. She was

very committed to Latin, which was a terrific topic for me because it was an

orderly and logical language that I very much enjoyed. Miss Beall's rigor and

real interest in me were quite strong influences and were something that led

me to think that I wanted to be a teacher. Dr. Boyle, the journalism teacher,

was also a strong influence. That class or activity contributed greatly to my

learning to write well. While I've said that there were a lot of able students in

my high school and the high school program was okay, it wasn't fabulous, and

I did get to college not really knowing how to write a paper. In my freshman

English writing class, the instructor ask us to go read an essay and write about

what you think about it. I had never before been asked to write about what I

thought about something [laughter]. What do you mean, what I think? We

had secondary sources. Learning to write grammatically and forcefully in Dr.

Boyle's journalism class was an important point for me. Seeing a strong

woman do well, as Dr. Boyle did, certainly had an influence on me too. The

editor-in-chief Steve Block and I went to law school together, and we've been

in touch in more recent years. When he was in Washington a few years ago,

we called Dr. Boyle together and indeed she's still alive. We asked her how

old she was and she didn't answer but my best guess would be that she was in

her late 80's or early 90's. And she's going strong [laughter]. She's still

15847v I -18-

teaching journalism classes. She's still working on college newspapers. She

left high school teaching at some point, taught in other places. She had a long

affiliation with Catholic University. It was quite an interesting conversation

and she continued to be quite a force. She was a significant influence on me.

The two teachers that I've mentioned are probably the two most forceful ones.

I would also say -- and this has continued to be true in my life -- that my peers

were and are a significant influence. In high school there were a group of

students, both girls and boys, as we would call them then, and they were smart

and thoughtful and we had discussions and, they were influences in my life.

And I don't mean in the sense of peer pressure that we talk about now, but in

the sense of really, showing a way that you can have a good friendship and

think about things, and worry about issues and commitment. That group of

my friends was significant to me.

Ms. Henry:

You mentioned that you really enjoyed your Latin class. Any other classes

come to mind as particularly pleasurable?

Ms. Schiffer:

The biology class that I took in tenth grade was a significant class. We had ...

that's another wonderful teacher. We had a truly fabulous teacher, Ruth

Strosnider, who had won many awards for teaching and I've always been

convinced that if my high school had more good science like that, I would

have become a scientist. That was really a wonderful class and she who was

so interested in the world and in learning and in teaching that she made a big

impression on me. I was very interested in math. I went to college thinking I

was going to be a math major so I was interested in the math classes that I

took along the way.

I 5847v1 -19-

Ms. Henry: Which was unusual at the time, wasn't it? For a ..

Ms. Schiffer: Well ...

Ms. Henry: a young girl to be interested in .

Ms. Schiffer: I mean I know that there's a lot of research about girls and math phobia. My

father did a lot of math so I didn't grow up with any math phobia. It was a

fairly common occurrence that a lot of people went to Radcliffe thinking they

were going to be math majors and then got disillusioned pretty fast because

really high powered math was something other than what we were doing. For

smart students in high school, math is an orderly, logical, problem-solving

process and if you think you can do well and you consider yourself a

mathematician. So it wasn't so unusual for people to go off thinking they

wanted to be math majors. When I got to college, I first learned that math was

something different than what I thought, and secondly, the world of social

science was opened to me and, as soon as I saw it I knew that this was for me.

Ms. Henry: When did you graduate from high school?

Ms. Schiffer: In 1962.

Ms. Henry: And then did you go ...

Ms. Schiffer: And I went immediately to college, yes. We were very much students of the

fifties in high school even though we graduated in the 1962.

Ms. Henry: What do you mean by that?

Ms. Schiffer: The open-mindedness and forward thinking of the sixties was something that

hadn't yet arrived for us. When I was in tenth grade, President Kennedy was

elected and inaugurated. That really had an effect on me and on us. First of

all, Kennedy recruited the best and brightest, new government employees

15847v1 -20-

came to town and their children were often in classes with us. We were

beginning to be more aware of the news and what was going on and the fact

that you had a young, dynamic President who made government attractive and

public service attractive was certainly something that we were very much

aware of. I failed to mention a couple of other timeline facts that were

significant. When I was in probably eighth grade, but certainly junior high

school, two events happened pretty much around the same time. Sputnik went

up -- the Russians put Sputnik into space, and at that time there were

demonstrations in Little Rock, Arkansas as Central High School, was trying to

be desegregated. I remember a discussion in our eighth grade class about the

significant event of that week and of course it seemed to me it was Little Rock

and seemed to many other people Sputnik, but the truth of it was that they

were both very significant. , The United States' response to Sputnik was to

substantially improve science curriculum, and although I don't think I was

particularly affected by it., a lot of people of our age and stage were affected

by that important step. And of course Little Rock's reverberations continue to

today. So we lived in a time when we were quite aware. On the other hand, I

also was not quite in junior high school when McCarthy was going on, but

that I was not particularly aware of.

Ms. Henry: And what's your recollection about Little Rock desegregation? You

obviously recognize it as a very important event.

Ms. Schiffer: We of course were all for race integration in my family ... so it seemed to us

that the resistance was terrible. And in retrospect, my mother always made

the point, which I think is right, that right after Brown vs. Board was decided.

15847v1 -21-

it would have been vastly preferable if President Eisenhower had announced

that it was morally correct and he was going to make it stick. That he decided

is something that inures to his detriment. We had a turning point in our

country, and it didn't take as attractive a course as it might have taken. Of

course as a result, as a nation we curtailed the lives of many people. As a

nation, now, just as we have made a lot of progress with women, we've made

a lot of progress on race too. Just not as much as we might hope.

Ms. Henry: So you began Radcliffe in what year?

Ms. Schiffer: I began Radcliffe in the Fall of 1962. Fairly shortly after I arrived, the Cuban

Missile Crisis occurred and i remember other students being sure that the

world as we knew it was going to be bombed to death. I didn't feel that way.

I was your average freshman, not quite sure I was there rightly, thinking

maybe I was the mistake in the admission process. Basically I very much

liked the opportunity to be with other students who were as smart as I was. I

had always gone to school thinking I was one of the smarter students in the

class, and now suddenly I had classrooms and friends who were similar and it

was really quite a wonderful experience. I didn't feel particularly prepared

and I had a pretty hard struggle for the first six months or so because I was

having trouble in math class and I didn't really know how to write a paper.

My peers were wonderful and I made close life-long friends from that group

of students. But it was kind of a mixed experience for awhile. So, there we

were in a circumstance where, though we wouldn't have said it at the time

women were very definitely second class. We lived in sex-segregated dorms.

Radcliffe had the girl's dorms and Harvard had men's dorms and houses.

15847v I -22-

There was a library on the main campus that women were not allowed into,

Lamont Library. No one quite believes that. We can tell people now, and

they think you're crazy, but actually that was true then. The much bigger and

more important fact is that we had virtually no women teachers. The message

was pretty much that you're second class. We weren't encouraged into

graduate programs in at all the same way as men were. We were aware that

there weren't easy, informal ways for with men and women to be together.

The classes were all sex-integrated classes but, because of the separate living

arrangements and no student union, it wasn't so easy. There were of course

many activities that were sex-integrated. It was mostly quite a terrific

experience and I liked it a lot.

Ms. Henry: You said the classes were sex-integrated?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, they were. There weren't separate Radcliffe classes.

Ms. Henry: And what was your experience being a young woman in those classes with

young men? Did you perceive any different treatment?

Ms. Schiffer: Of course, I'd been in high school that way too, and so that was nothing new

to me. In the classes, I didn't perceive different treatment. In retrospect, I

think there was plenty of different treatment and of course, when we've all

gone to reunions now, a great deal of anger comes out. To me, what summed

it up, though I wouldn't have thought this at the time, is that when I went to

apply to law school, the Radcliffe guidance counselor told me I might not get

into any law school, rather than doing what she ought to have been doing --

going over to Harvard and saying our students have had exactly the same

education as the Harvard students, and Harvard law school ought to prefer

15847vI -23-

Radcliffe students in exactly the same way as it refers Harvard College

students. But instead, we got the message that you girls all write well, we did

well on the writing test, but not that the school was out there fighting for us to

be treated equally with regard to law school admissions. Now, of course, I did

get into law school, but I think it summed up a part of the attitude of the

College that someone in authority would tell me I couldn't get into law

school. I don't mean just me, it really was a framework, both for the fact that

there was a double standard, and that nobody was out there fighting to end

that double standard any time soon. The basic message at Radcliffe at the

time was sounded by the President, Mary Bunting, who had the message that

women can work: she herself had quite a good career both in the government -

- she was on what was then called the Atomic Energy Commission -- and as

president of the college; and at the same time have a family, and somehow

will work out. Nobody was too heavily into the details of how it would

somehow all work out. At the same time, there was clearly this thread of a

double standard, in regard to what academic opportunities we were given,

what attention was paid to us and again, in going to professional schools,

nobody was pushing for most of the women.

Ms. Henry:

Did you have any women professors at Radcliffe?

Ms. Schiffer:

Very few. My freshman year, I took a seminar on India and the teacher was

the one Radcliffe professor, Cora DuBois, who was a sociologist. She was

one the very few. I had one woman section teacher. When you had a big

class, the "sectionmen" taught an add-on classes. I had a woman section

teacher in the philosophy courses that I took. That was pretty much it.

I 5847vI -24-

Ms. Henry: Who were the major influences on you during college?

Ms. Schiffer: Certainly my friends. My friend Susan Segal, who became Susan Segal Rai,

was the person who introduced me to law school. She had been a senior in my

dorm when I was a freshman and she then went on to law school. I always tell

her she's the reason I went to law school. She always laughs. She was plainly

a significant influence and continues to be a close friend. There was a woman

named Kate Hollahan, who was a few years ahead of me and who majored in

Social Studies; she was influential in getting me into that major, which was a

special honors major, and that was very significant to my college career.

There was, my friend Marcia Siegel, who continues to be one of my closest

friends, and was a peer to me, and she was very influential. Then I was in this

special major Social Studies -- where we had a series of tutors, some of whom

were graduate students. The theory of Social Studies was that you could not

look at the problems of society from only one discipline. I focused on the

problems of industrial societies, through the background, both theoretical and

as applied, of history, government, economics and social relations. That

approach was interesting and influential in the way I have thought about

problems since. You can't look at them from just a narrow perspective but

need to examine the problems more broadly if you are going to solve them.

Some of the tutors I had -- tutors were a kind of teacher at Harvard who were

graduate students in various social sciences -- were very influential as well. I

wrote my senior thesis with John Rawls, who was a famous philosophy

professor, and focused on equality, and he was influential.

Ms. Henry: Well I would say that's a great understatement [laughter].

158470 -25-

Ms. Schiffer: He was a wonderful man.

Ms. Henry: Most people would know who John Rawls is. Can you tell me a little about

the thesis that you . .

Ms. Schiffer: Yes. It is an odd thesis and if I had it to do over, I might do it differently. I

focused on novels about ideal societies, utopian novels, and what we could

learn from them about equality and how they handled issues of equality. I

used the John Rawls framework, which in those days hadn't been finalized

yet, but he'd been thinking about it for a long time. So I really struggled with,

how you deal with equal treatment and what does it mean to be equal and

Rawls had a theory of looking at putting ourselves in a state of no knowledge

and looking at the least well off person. That's a helpful approach to thinking

about solving social problems.

Ms. Henry: Was there any, did you have any particular focus on gender at the time, or it

was just across society?

Ms. Schiffer: It was really across the board and if you asked any of us at the time what we

were thinking about in terms of equality, the focus was plainly on race. I

graduated from college in 1966. This is when the big civil rights activity was

going on and there isn't any doubt that that was the primary focus of our

struggle with equality.

Ms. Henry: Were you active in any way in the civil rights movement during your college

years?

Ms. Schiffer: Not during my college years. After my first year in law school, I spent a

summer in Mississippi. Before that, I certainly was sympathetic to the civil

rights movement.

15847v1 -26-

Ms. Henry: You mentioned the people who were influences on you in college and, if I

understand it right, all of these people that you mentioned were your peers,

correct?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: No one comes to mind who was a teacher or professor or administrator,

anything like that.

Ms. Schiffer: The tutors that I mentioned in social studies were quite influential on me. We

all were aware of Mary Bunting and what she did and so that was an influence

that pervaded the school, but I didn't know her well. On the other hand, the

college had administrators who told you that you might not get into law

school.

Ms. Henry: Now you said that your friend Susan Rai, did go to Harvard Law School, is

that right?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, she did go to Harvard Law School.

Ms. Henry: And she went to Harvard Law School when you were a sophomore or junior?

Ms. Schiffer: Sophomore.

Ms. Henry: And how did that influence you?

Ms. Schiffer: Here was a friend, who I saw going through law school. Because she was at

Harvard, she lived near me and so we saw each other quite regularly. We

actually were together when we both learned that President Kennedy had been

shot. 1 could see that here was a woman who was going to law school and

doing fine. It made it apparent to me that that was an option in a way that was

very influential.

15847v1

27-

Ms. Henry: And so what was the next step? You saw that Susan was going to law school.

You saw it as an option. What did you do to move forward with that?

Ms. Schiffer: Also I was dating at the time a man who eventually became a first-year law

student as well. That also had an impact. So, I applied to a gamut of law

schools. They were telling me I might not get in anywhere, so I applied to

five or six law schools. I remember -- this is now laughable -- that I was

considering graduate school as well, though I wasn't particularly committed to

a specific discipline, and was certainly not getting particular encouragement.

But the applications for graduate school were long and involved writing long

essays, and the application for Harvard Law School was two index cards, and

so that was pretty much what swung me [laughter] to sticking with law school.

I applied to a range of law schools and once I got into enough of them, I

pulled the rest of my applications and then spent the traditional week

agonizing about whether to go to Harvard or Yale. Partly I knew Cambridge

and partly there were very women in any of these law school classes, but in

my class at Yale law, there would have been only six or seven women and that

seemed like a very small pool to me, whereas in my Harvard class, there were

all of 35 of us in a class of over 500. But it provided a bigger group of people

women peers.

Ms. Henry: So you applied and were granted admission to all these law schools and then

you eventually selected Harvard.

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: Now that would have been, would that have been in your junior or senior

year?

I 5847v1 -28-

Ms. Schiffer: My senior year.

Ms. Henry: Your senior year. So you graduated from Radcliffe in what year?

Ms. Schiffer: 1966. And then I went directly to law school.

Ms. Henry: Now, during the time you were in college, did you work?

Ms Schiffer: I worked in the summers. Let me see if I can reconstruct this. The summer

after my freshman year, I didn't work, I traveled in Europe. The summer after

my sophomore year, I worked in Washington for the Agency for International

Development. The summer after my junior year, I went to Berkeley. And the

summer after my senior year, I worked in Washington at 0E0, which was the

Office of Economic Opportunity.

Ms. Henry: You said the summer after your freshman year, you traveled.

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: Where did you go?

Ms. Schiffer: I was on a program sponsored by Oberlin College to learn to speak French and

study, to take classes in French and then to travel primarily around France.

We did that and then when the program ended, I also did a little bit of

traveling in Scandinavia.

Ms. Henry: Any events stand out in your mind from that summer?

Ms. Schiffer: I became fluent in French, which I no longer have, I'm sad to say, but it was

quite significant at the time. Seeing a different culture was an interesting

experience, living in a different way. Also the substantive learning about

French architecture and art and language courses was quite interesting.

Ms. Henry:

And then you said you worked your second summer for the Agency for

International Development here in Washington? What did you do?

15847vI -29-

Ms. Schiffer: I lived at home because this is where my family was. I was a summer intern

in that part of AID that was responsible for bringing people with knowledge

from foreign countries to the United States and I remember working to do the

paperwork for a group of social scientists who were coming from the Middle

East. It was just a low-level job.

Ms. Henry: And your third summer, you were at Berkeley. Were you taking classes?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I did. I really wanted a summer in California. That summer was really

the first time I went west of the East Coast. I took a class in art and a class in

modem literature and lived in Berkeley and traveled around California. At the

end of the summer I went to visit a friend of mine who was living for the

summer in Watts and left there a week or so before the Watts Riots. We have

to cast our minds back to what those times were like. I loved Berkeley and

thought California was pretty spectacular . My eyes were opened to the fact

that there was more than the East Coast in this country.

Ms. Henry: And then finally, after you graduated, you worked in the Office of Economic

Opportunity also in Washington?

Ms. Schiffer: It was also in Washington and was also pretty much of a summer intern job.

But of course 0E0 was doing important work. It was running a whole set of

President Johnson's programs to lift people out of poverty. I particularly

worked on the Job Corps. It was at a time when we thought there was good

hope for government programs to help address some of the real inequalities of

income in our country. I was around people who were setting up the Job

Corps and making it happen. It was quite exciting.

Ms. Henry: And then in the Fall of 1966, you started at Harvard Law School?

15847v1 -30-

Ms. Schiffer: Yes.

Ms. Henry: And you said you were one of 35 women?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, we were a tiny handful. The dean made it clear we didn't belong there.

The class was over 500 students divided up into four sections, so each section

had about 150 people and of that, I would say it was seven or eight women.

So we were very visible [laughter]. We were very much not equally treated in

different ways by different professors. The dean made it quite clear that we

didn't belong there, that we were taking the place of men. Even if we thought

that we were not well treated in college, this was sort of whole new world of

discrimination.

Ms. Henry: And how did the dean convey that? I mean, you obviously have this

impression. How was it conveyed to you?

Ms. Schiffer: My memory, which may be apocryphal, is that at the opening program, the

dean conveyed the values of the law school, and made some suggestion he

wasn't so fond of the fact that there were now women in law school.

Ms. Henry:

Now did your, the group of women in your class, were you a close group,

since there were so- few of you?

Ms. Schiffer: We were very close and we all knew each other and we all talked to each

other. We were also friends with the men in our class.

Ms. Henry: Sure.

Ms. Schiffer: But the women really did know each other because, we were in a little

fishbowl there [laughter], and I continue to have some very good friends from

that time. I lived in an apartment. There were four of us -- me, another

woman in my law school class, a woman who was a first-year medical

158470 -31-

student, and a woman who was getting a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at

MIT. We had all been in the same class in Radcliffe, but hadn't particularly

known each other. That was really a wonderful experience too. We all

learned to cook, we had endless discussions, as aspiring lawyers and doctors,

about the intersection of those issues, and what were the issues that we were

dealing with, and that was a quite exciting time. I actually very much liked

the first year in law school once I got the hang of it. I thought the classes

were very interesting, there was a level of thinking about things that I found

interesting. I had some very wonderful classmates, both women and men.

And some very fine professors.

Ms. Henry: How did the men in your class react to having women in the class?

Ms. Schiffer: It was the total gamut. Some of them thought it was just fine and then the

person who sat next to me in one of my classes said: "now why aren't you

home doing pottery? I think the breathtaking part was that people felt free

to say that to you. But it was a different time and we have to remember that.

We very much felt that we were pioneers, that this was something really

special, that we were women in law school, and in Harvard Law School no

less. So we just put up with it. But it was a time when people told you they

might never hire you and professors didn't call on you or, as in the case of my

property professor, put all the women in the front of the room one day to talk

about dower. So it wasn't a very pretty picture, but the other side of it was,

that you were visible so when people came to interview, you would be the

person who stood out if they interviewed 15 or 20 people and. Most of us

have had good careers.

5847v1 -32-

Ms. Henry:

Now you said you enjoyed your first year quite a bit. What can you remember

about that first year?

Ms. Schiffer:

I remember it pretty vividly. I used to say it's like going back to junior high

school. We had lockers, we had sections, you moved around with your

section in groups. We had study groups. We read cases and talked about the

cases. It was a fairly rigorous program. There was a fair amount of reading. I

remember my friends. I remember that we talked about course work and the

legal issues. And I think how, though I wouldn't have thought it at the time

that we were in the process of becoming lawyers. We were in the process of

looking at facts and trying to discern what are the facts and what is the law?

And, bringing a certain amount of skepticism and also intellectual rigor to it.

Of course the law school classes were much focused in those days on

appellate cases and, appellate cases primarily in the traditional subjects.

Certainly first year, it was all the traditional subjects. We had contracts,

property, torts, civil procedure, criminal law, which was both criminal

procedure and criminal law. [END OF TAPE]

Ms. Henry:

We could call it Tape 3 but it's physically Tape 2, Side A of the Lois Schiffer

oral history. And Lois was just telling me about her experience at Harvard.

And Lois, we were talking about your first couple of years and your

experience there. What else can you recall about your first year?

Ms. Schiffer:

We took quite traditional courses. In criminal law, which was a combination

of substantive criminal law and criminal procedure, I was taken out of my

section and was put into a special little class. Harvard was trying an

experiment of seeing what it was like to have classes of 35 people in the first

15847v1 -33-

year. The program set up one class in each of several topics and took people

out of their regular sections. I was put into the special criminal law class and I

remember being very upset about it because I was being taken out of

Professor Dershowitz' class and put into a criminal law class with Roger

Fisher, who wasn't much of an expert on criminal law. Fisher certainly called

on the women in his class, but he was quite putting down of us. We were

aware of it at the time, although I loved the subject and thought it was really

quite fascinating. My torts professor, was a visiting professor from Berkeley

and quite a lovely guy and I very much enjoyed him and interestingly, he had

a professional wife, but he didn't call on women unless they volunteered and I

once asked him why and he said, "well girls have to comb their hair." The

idea was we had other things to do. The property class was sad. I mean it was

focused on medieval land law and not on modern [laughter], not on modern

property law and that was the professor who put the women in front of the

room and had us talk about dower. So, I certainly felt, and I would probably

generalize this to many of the women, felt that while we certainly belonged

there, we were so separately treated, that there was a little gnawing part of us

that thought, well maybe we really aren't able to do this and maybe we really

aren't able to be good lawyers. It was a little disquieting. But the program

was interesting and I certainly had wonderful friends -- both men and women.

I learned a lot and enjoyed thinking in the way that lawyers think. I was quite

focused in those days on wanting to be a poverty lawyer and wanting to do

law for poor people. In the first year, you're pretty focused on your classes

rather than much outside activity. I do remember that although we had a

5847v1 -34-

program on how to do legal research, I pretty much got all the way through

law school without really knowing how to do legal research and it wasn't until

I had my first job out of law school and then became a law clerk the following

year that I really learned how you found cases and dug out legal research

materials. When I tell people that, they look at me as if the intellectual

stimulation, the way of thinking "...and you got all the way through Harvard

Law School" and I did [laughter]. But and our living circumstance, where we

had this wonderful intellectual and fun experience, are the big things that I

remember of my first year in law school.

Ms. Henry: Did you work after your first year?

Ms. Schiffer: The summer after my first year I went to Mississippi on a program through the

NAACP Legal Defense Fund. I was in the Fund office in Jackson doing

research on civil rights cases.

Ms. Henry: And what can you recall from that summer?

Ms. Schiffer: We were scared. It was not 1964, but on the other hand, there was certainly

still plenty of discrimination. I lived in a house with a couple of other people

in a middle class black sc-ction of Jackson, and went to the office every day.

We pretty much stayed in Jackson but we had a couple of experiences where

we went out of town and it was very much a sense of us and them -- there was

real race segregation. I met some terrific people that summer and people who

were really committed to and working on civil rights. One felt you were

making a little bit of contribution to what was a really important and

significant movement.

A

5847vI -35-

Ms. Henry: And were there other law students who were participating in the program as

well?

Ms. Schiffer: There were. There were several.

Ms. Henry: And were there other women, were you the only woman, what was that like?

Ms. Schiffer: There were other women and that was not particularly a focus. Our real focus

was on the race discrimination.

Ms. Henry: So you did research on civil rights cases?

Ms. Schiffer: I did.

Ms. Henry: Does any thing particular come to mind?

Ms. Schiffer: No, not particularly. I remember we were developing a case on the statewide

schools for the deaf and there were two in Jackson, a black one and a white

one. We took a tour of the black one and the poor conditions compared to the

white one were just remarkable. It would be very hard to have anything other

than have it hit you in the face that this was about as unequal as two facilities

could be. That's a very clear memory of that summer.

Ms. Henry: Did the experience change you in any way or were you already cognizant of

these race issues by the time you got there?

Ms. Schiffer: I would certainly say I was cognizant of them. The sense of what it was like

to be living in the thick of it was a significant experience to me and to see

what life was like for people who really lived there and really participated in it

was a significant experience to me.

Ms. Henry: And this was your first visit to the South.

Ms. Schiffer: It was my first visit to the South.

Ms. Henry: Then you returned to Harvard for your second year of law school.

15847v1 -36-

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I did and it was a little less fun than first year, I thought, but we had

some more flexibility in the courses we were taking. I don't really remember

all the courses I took. I do remember -- because in retrospect it's pretty funny

-- that I took a course called Economic Regulation with Derek Bock, which

covered everything we would now call the regulatory state, and that is how

many, many, many courses in law school, but then it was folded up into one. I

took Administrative Law, which I thought was quite interesting and of course,

became a significant subject matter in my later work. I took tax and then my

tax professor, who was Dean Griswold, got called to be Solicitor General, so

then we had to switch tax professors. But I don't remember so much more

about it.

Ms. Henry: Were you involved in any other activities outside of class?

Ms. Schiffer: Yes, I was. I was involved in an early clinical program called CLAO,

Community Legal Community Legal Assistance Office, or maybe Cambridge

Legal Assistance Office that, because these things have a way of coming back

full circle, was then run by John Ferren who you know, later was somebody I

knew when I moved to Washington. I handled a couple of cases through

CLAO, though to be sure I didn't have a very clear idea of how to go about

[laughter] handling those cases. That was a program that I participated in,

either in my second or third year.

Ms. Henry: Anything else stand out from your second year? Although you said it wasn't

quite as interesting as the first.

Ms. Schiffer: Not particularly.

Ms. Henry: And what did you do after . . .

I 5847v1 -37-

Ms. Schiffer: The summer after my second year, I went to work for a big New York law

firm as a summer associate. At Kaye Scholer in New York where I worked on

a corporate closing and Kaye Scholer represented the National Education

Association and I worked on a couple of matters for them. We spent quite a

bit of time in the library that summer talking about the upcoming 1968

election. That was a very interesting and difficult election for people of my

age and stage. That was when McCarthy was running, when people were not

so happy about Senator Humphrey and it was a summer in turmoil vis-a-vis

who the President would be. I remember having a lot of discussions about

that. It wasn't really part of the law firm summer program. I also remember

some pretty blatant discrimination on the basis of sex. First of all, this was a

law firm that did hire women for the summer; not all law firms did. Secondly,

there was a dinner for people in Boston who were going to be or had been

summer associates of that program and it was at a big downtown Boston

restaurant, the name of which will come to me, but it was the famous, old line

Boston restaurant [Lochober's] and because there were a few women in the

group, we had to be upstairs in a private room. We couldn't sit in the main

dining room. That summer, I had worked on some corporate closing and at

the end of the corporate closing everybody went off to lunch at a club except

for me. who wasn't invited, because it wasn't a club that let in women. So,

we really had a pretty clear sense that there were mountains to climb here, and

the message was sent. And this was a law firm that was, regarded as at the top

in terms of women. I think there was even a woman partner. There was

certainly a woman who was well on the way to being a partner. But all along

5847v1 -38-

the way there were these messages of, women are separate, women are

separate, women are separate. In my third year, when I interviewed, there

were law firms that told me," we hired a woman once. We may never hire

another one.- There were people among my group who knew this wasn't

right, but I don't think any of us thought we ought to be filing lawsuits at that

point.

Ms. Henry: Now I was going to ask you. You talked about your third year interviewing. I

wanted to ask you about your second year interview process where you were

looking for your first law firm job. What can you recall about that?

Ms. Schiffer: I had plenty of offers, so I don't have any bad feelings about it, though

somebody at a prominent Washington law firm that shall remain nameless

told me I hadn't done well enough. It was interesting to me in later life, when

lawyers from that firm were on the other side of cases from me. I remember

that, some people told us they might never hire us, and on the other hand, if

people had interviewed a whole raft of people in a day, it was clear that we

stuck out and that wasn't necessarily a bad thing when somebody's

interviewed 19 people who look the same and one person who looks different.

We all asked, I remember asking people who had been in those law firms the

summer before, do they hire women, how do they treat women? So it was

somewhat on our mind, but not in as significant a way as it might have been.

Ms. Henry: And then you were able to . . .

Ms. Schiffer: I picked the law firm I picked because a woman I knew who was a year ahead

of me had been there the summer before and had said she'd had a good

experience and that seemed as good a basis as any to pick . . . I don't think

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that I thought of this as picking the law firm where I was going to spend the

rest of my life. I thought of it as this will be a summer experience in New

York and it'll be fun [laughter]. And so, that was as good a basis as any to

pick.

Ms. Henry: And do you recall any particular influences coming out of that summer at

Kaye Scholer? Anything that stands out in your mind, as being important for

your career?

Ms. Schiffer: Not really. I recall one funny story was on the way to getting the job. The

system was similar then to what it is now - people came to the law school,

interviewed and then if they liked you, you went back down to the firm to

interview. I went to New York to interview with a big poobah. He was a

small, balding man and he had pictures of little children on the walls. And I

said, "Oh are these your grandchildren?" And of course they were his

children [laughter]. I learned from that not to ever make [laughter] that

mistake again. He didn't say anything. But . . . don't assume. I was

mortified. But in terms of practicing law, nothing particular stands out. \

Ms. Henry: So you spent your first summer at Kaye Scholer.

Ms. Schiffer: My second summer.

Ms. Henry: I'm sorry, your second summer. You had done public work before and now

this was in the private sector. How did that compare in your mind at the time?

Ms. Schiffer:

I didn't particularly compare it. Ifs not as if I thought I really wanted to work

for a law firm and this was the big test. I more thought I really want to do

poverty law but spend the summer working in New York and get a big law

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firm experience and so I didn't compare them in quite that way. And it was a

fine summer.

[END OF TAPE]

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