As the first woman ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Colorado in its 79-year history in 1972, Patricia Schroeder quickly became aware of
entrenched attitudes against females in Congress. When a congressional colleague
asked her how she, a mother of two small children, could be a
legislator at the same time, she responded, "I have a brain and a uterus and I use them both."
Congresswoman Schroeder was also a lawyer and faced the same entrenched attitudes against female attorneys.
When my wife and I opened up our law practice in Texarkana, Texas together in 1986 Jane made up only one of three females out of approximately a 100 attorneys at the time. I think we need to all remember that was not all that long ago. In fact, it was not until the 70s that a federal judge ended the practice at Texarkana Community College and universities in Texas of requiring a woman to get her husband's written permission in order to take college classes.
That is the reason that I am so terribly concerned by Susan Cartier Liebel's denial of attorneys' fees because she was representing her husband and because she works from home.
Why?
Because any good lawyer with a brain knows that, in Susan's case, the work from home questioning represents nothing more than code meaning she is a housewife helping her husband. How cute. How sweet. Now go back to your housekeeping duties and child care and leave this to the big boys to handle, little lady. The difference is that attorneys get paid, but dutiful housewives do not. This might be a work at home issue to some degree, but no more than it is intended as "evidence" on denying attorneys' fees to a housewife.
Gender bias has not gone away just because females make up larger percentages of law school classes. No, in today's world, gender bias usually is not apparent from what people say to your face. Rather it is what they say behind your back, it is how they act with their colleagues in private, it is the things they say and do and act without thinking. Gender bias is so well-ingrained in the characters of some lawyers and judges and those in the legal profession that they say things which are patently offensive toward women lawyers or about women lawyers and obviously have no idea that they have said anything wrong. The problem of eliminating the gender bias is very difficult, but more difficult is how do we eliminate from positions of power these lawyers and judges that latently allow it and allow it to affect their rulings?
My wife is a lawyer. My oldest daughter is going to law school. I am on the look out for gender bias. It offends me.
Some judges will simply not allow it. They would have recognized the questions in Susan's case for what they were and would have cut it off immediately. They would have shut down the mock sarcasm of opposing counsel, and put him in his place or out of the room. For ultimately all of us attorneys work for money. It is the sad position of life. And, it matters not that you work from home or that you are representing a relative. It is a simple Lodestar analysis -- the number of hours reasonably worked multiplied by the the prevailing hourly rate for such work. Is there any doubt that a man required to represent his wife would have been allowed fees for prevailing in a case for no other reason than he is perceived as the bread winner?
Whether it is racism, gender bias, plaintiff bias, dislike of the prevailing law by even well intentioned judges, is there nothing more objectionable, more sinister, or more degrading than denying someone the fruits of their labor? Time is all we in law have. We cannot replace it. It is bad enough that whether we get paid is too often based on whether we prevail. How objectionable then that even when we prevail that we are not paid. How contemptuous when an attorney is not paid because she is perceived as a housewife.
This is just simply disgraceful.
That outcome is one of the most biased and wrong-headed results that I have ever heard of. If the shoe were on the other foot - and the husband had the at-home practice, I bet fees wouldn't have been denied. Ridiculous.
Posted by: Gary M. Zeiss, Esq. | May 20, 2007 at 02:03 PM