 Shirley S. Abrahamson. Photograph courtesy of the authors of www.shirleyabranamson.org. By Amy Rabideau Silvers An obituary in The New York Times called her “an indefatigable jurist known for her activist voice and tart dissents.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s obituary called her someone who crashed through barriers for women, earning “a national reputation as a leader in liberal judicial thought.” Others called Shirley Abrahamson a mentor and a friend. Abrahamson was the first woman appointed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, serving 43 years on the bench, including 19 years as chief justice. At retirement, she was the longest-serving state court justice in the country, and she certainly remains the longest serving in Wisconsin history. Appointed by Gov. Patrick Lucey* in 1976, she went on to win four 10-year terms. For many of those years, she was the only woman on the bench. By the time she retired in 2019, five of the seven justices were women, later to be joined by a sixth. “Among jurists I have encountered in the United States and abroad, Shirley Abrahamson is the very best,” declared Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a videotaped tribute as Abrahamson retired. “The most courageous and sage, the least self-regarding. “She has been ever mindful of the people—all of the people—the law exists, or should exist to serve,” Ginsburg said. “As a lawyer, law teacher and judge, she has inspired legions to follow in her way, to strive constantly to make the legal system genuinely equal and accessible to all.” An early dream Abrahamson was born Shirley Schlanger, the daughter of Manhattan grocers Leo and Ceil Schlanger. Her parents were immigrants from Poland, and as the family story goes, little Shirley was 4 when she decided that she wanted to be president. At 6, she changed her mind and decided to become a lawyer. She later told the story of wanting a library card after the family moved for a time to New Jersey, while she was in grade school. “My mother and I went to the public library, but I couldn’t get a card because my parents didn’t own property,” Abrahamson recalled. “You see, your family had to own property to get a library card.” Her father ended up taking off work to find the landlord and persuaded him to write a letter. The situation left her feeling “that my family was put into this second-class position. … My father was running a successful grocery business, paid his bills, and why I couldn’t get a library card. … It just didn’t make sense … and it didn’t seem fair.” Fair was something she felt everybody deserved. Facing other challenges She graduated from high school at 16. She next graduated from York University in Manhattan, magna cum laude, and married Seymour Abrahamson. Together they relocated to Indiana University in Bloomington. There she graduated first in her law school class in 1956. She received no job offers. “She was a woman and she was Jewish,” said Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, speaking in an interview with Wisconsin Justice Initiative. “The dean of the law school told her she wouldn’t get a job, but he’d try to get her a job as a law librarian.” Instead, Shirley and Seymour—he earned a doctorate in genetics—moved to Madison. There Abrahamson studied with J. Willard Hurst, a UW law school professor and pioneer in legal history, earning a doctorate in 1962. That same year she was hired at La Follette, Sinykin, Doyle & Anderson—the first woman hired by a private law firm in Madison. Within the year, she became a named partner. Abrahamson soon began teaching at the law school. In 1966, she was offered a professorship in tax law. She accepted on the condition that the other woman on the faculty, Assistant Professor Margo Melli, also receive tenure.  Abrahamson in court (likely early to mid-1960s). Photograph created by Edwin Stein, courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society, image WJI 149705. A master at mentoring Along the way, she offered encouragement to countless others. Angela Bartell, now retired as a Dane County Circuit Court judge, remembers going to the UW Law School to meet with Abrahamson before enrolling in 1968. “She was one of two women professors—Margo Melli was the other,” Bartell told WJI. “My husband graduated from law school in 1968 and there were only four or five women in his class. And so I met with the two women on the faculty and said, ‘How did you do this?’ and they were both very encouraging.” The few women students found support with each other—and in the one women’s restroom in the old section of the law building, complete with a fainting-style couch. “You knew you could likely find women there,” she said. “It was a shelter—that’s really the only word for it—from the battle that was going on outside.” Women found an even bigger challenge at graduation, especially if they wanted to join a private practice. Bartell experienced that firsthand in 1971. “There was the question of whether clients would be comfortable with a woman lawyer. Would women lawyers be a viable economic resource? Were women tough enough to fight in an adversarial system? This is sounding quite quaint,” she said, with a laugh. “I had only one offer, though I graduated first in my class,” Bartell said. “So the profession was not open. I ended up joining the law firm where Shirley was a named partner, so I had a woman colleague. “It became a ritual for law firms to take the new woman and introduce her to Shirley Abrahamson,” she said. “It was a long and bumpy road, and Shirley was this high-performing, welcoming mentor to all, and that was for decades. She was such a pioneer.” Abrahamson was a founder of the Legal Association for Women, which began in 1974, for women in law in the Dane County area. “She was a mentor to women all over the state,” said former Justice Janine Geske, who joined her as the second woman on the Supreme Court in 1993. “Male attorneys would bring their daughters to meet her.”  Abrahamson at her 1976 swearing-in ceremony. Photograph by WiscNews, courtesy of authors of www.shirleyabrahamson.org. Queen of court outreach Abrahamson championed judicial outreach, helping to create programs that included the award-winning Court with Class program. Tens of thousands of students have visited the State Capitol to hear oral arguments and meet with a justice. Abrahamson also believed that the courts could go to the people, promoting the Justice on Wheels effort. That, too, continues. “Pick a county—from Kenosha to Superior, Door County to Rock County—and we go there and have legal arguments and meet with people in the community,” Bradley said. Then there’s the Tootsie the Goldfish lesson, in which kids get to “think like a judge.” “She was the queen of outreach for the courts,” Bradley said. Geske agreed. “She was always thinking of ways to connect people to the courts,” Geske said. That included traveling to speak to any group interested in the legal system. Her friends quipped that no distance was too great and no group too small to talk about the courts. “Before we were close friends, she called and asked if I would go speak because she was snowed in at JFK,” said Geske, who agreed to fill in. “There were maybe 12 people there.” Once while traveling in northern Wisconsin, she ended up in a boat with musky fishermen. “She caught the winning musky,” Geske said. “And she had it stuffed and hung on the wall of her chambers.”  Abrahamson presiding over a Justice on Wheels hearing. Photograph courtesy of the Wisconsin Supreme Court and authors of www.shirleyabrahamson.com.  Play the Toosie the Goldfish game by clicking on this graphic. Creating change and connections In other noteworthy efforts, Abrahamson served on the citizens’ committee studying how to reorganize the state courts in the 1970s. That resulted in the creation of the Court of Appeals. Study committee meetings were being held throughout the state, with one scheduled at the Madison Club. There was only one problem with that plan. “The club had no women members,” Bartell said. “And no women were allowed at the bar level. Shirley Abrahamson was not going to be allowed to attend the meeting. She took that up like a tigress. The committee pulled out of that location and they met elsewhere. “She fought not only so many battles herself but she served as a shield for other women coming up behind her,” said Bartell. Abrahamson was involved in writing Madison’s equal-opportunity law and served as director of the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter from 1967 to 1974. And, later as a justice, she partnered with tribal leaders, including the Wisconsin Tribal Judges Association, to hold the first conference for tribal and state court officials. “She had the first state courts conference ever in the nation,” Bradley said. “I remember sitting at a table with someone from a tribe in Alaska. People came from that far.” Time on Wisconsin Supreme Court During her long years on the court, Abrahamson participated in more than 3,500 cases, authoring 535 majority opinions, 493 dissenting opinions, and 326 concurring opinions. She did not mince words in her dissents. In a 1992 case, State v. Mitchell, the court ruled that an increased penalty in a hate crime case was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court later reversed that decision. Wrote Abrahamson: “Bigots are free to think and express themselves as they wish, except that they may not engage in criminal conduct in furtherance of their beliefs. The state’s interest in punishing bias-related criminal conduct related only to the protection of equal rights and the prevention of crime, not to the suppression of free expression.” A 2015 case involved whether Gov. Scott Walker had illegally coordinated with conservative groups during a recall effort. A divided Supreme Court decision ended the investigation. “Lest the length, convoluted analysis and overblown rhetoric of the majority opinion obscure its effect, let me state clearly,” she said in her dissent. “The majority opinion adopts an unprecedented and faulty interpretation of Wisconsin’s campaign finance law and of the First Amendment.” Some of her writing was for in-house reading only. “We used to circulate proposed decisions among the justices and conference those opinions,” Geske said of their shared time on the state Supreme Court. “Shirley would issue three-page, single-spaced memos on an opinion. I learned to appreciate what she was doing. She wanted my opinion to be as clear as possible, and her memos helped me write a better decision. She was the smartest and hardest working person I ever met.” Abrahamson began serving as chief justice in 1996, when she became the most senior member of the court. That changed in 2015, with a constitutional amendment to allow justices to select their own chief justice. Conservative justices quickly picked Justice Patience Roggensack. Abrahamson sued in federal court—lost and then appealed—before deciding the case would take too long. Instead, she vowed to remain “independent, impartial and nonpartisan, and help the court system improve.” She retired in 2019, a year after being diagnosed with cancer. She died of pancreatic cancer in 2020. Abrahamson was 87. And beyond Wisconsin Abrahamson earned a reputation throughout the country and internationally, especially well known for what has been called new federalism. “She was among a handful, not even a full handful, of judges and justices in the country really leading the charge of revitalizing state constitutions, and she was at the head of that,” Bradley said in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel after Abrahamson’s death. Abrahamson concluded a 1982 law review article on new federalism by invoking the words of an 1855 decision (Attorney General ex rel. Bashford v. Barstow 4 Wis. 567, 758 (1855)) by the Wisconsin Supreme Court: “The people then made this constitution, and adopted it as their primary law. The people of other states made for themselves respectively, constitutions which are construed by their own appropriate functionaries. Let them construe theirs—let us construe, and stand by ours.” “The idea,” Bradley told WJI, “is that state constitutions may provide individual rights in excess of those given by the federal Constitution. Not fewer rights but more.” Abrahamson was considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court as early as 1979 by President Jimmy Carter to fill a possible vacancy by Justice William J. Brennan Jr. (Brennan continued serving until 1990.) In 1993, Abrahamson was on the short list to replace Justice Byron R. White. President Bill Clinton instead chose Ginsburg. Setting the bar on ethics Abrahamson did more than talk about judicial ethics and independence. Judges, she believed, needed to be absolutely beyond reproach. “As a judge, you are not supposed to endorse partisan candidates,” Geske said. Abrahamson did not endorse any candidates or accept any gifts. “She had a hard-and-fast rule,” Geske said. “I could not buy her a cup of coffee. Ann (Walsh Bradley) and I would take her out for her birthday, and she would pay the check. No one could question her ethics.” Should any question of ethics arise, “I would think, ‘What would Shirley do?’” she said. Geske said Abrahamson would have been deeply concerned about questions involving judicial integrity, including the recent decision regarding presidential immunity. “She’d be going nuts at what’s going on right now, especially with the U.S. Supreme Court, at the partisanship and the bias,” Geske said. “That would have really bothered her.” Continuing a legacy Friends and colleagues believe that Shirley Abrahamson’s legacy has the power to inspire others to care about the judicial system. Toward that goal, they began the Chief Justice Shirley S. Abrahamson Legacy Committee. Projects include annual awards for law students committed to “social justice, an independent judiciary, and equal rights for all.” The reading room at the Wisconsin Historical Society has been dedicated in her honor. There’s a website about her with everything from a timeline and family photos to resources regarding her opinions. Committee members are exploring the possibility of a documentary about her life and influence. Should anyone think that Shirley Abrahamson was all serious business, just remember that Toostie the Goldfish is still teaching kids to think like a judge. “Shirley was fun,” Bradley said of her friend. “She had an absolute commitment to maintaining and restoring public trust in the judiciary,” said Bradley. “She believed in justice and equal justice for all.” Whatever the topic, Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson had a way with words. Here are a few quotes, taken from the website dedicated to her legacy. More quotes may be found at www.shirleyabrahamson.org/quotes/.
*Note: This story was updated on Aug. 22, 2024, to correct the name of the governor who appointed Abrahamson. We apologize for the error. (Thank you careful readers!)  This project is supported by grants from  
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Donate
Help WJI advocate for justice in Wisconsin
|
RSS Feed