Dana Lake ‘23
Staff Editor
Here at the Law Weekly, we try and celebrate an easygoing good news story where we can. 2020 has been a year marked by an overwhelming feeling of doom—when there’s something uncomplicated and optimistic to write on, you can bet we’ll run with it. So, ignoring a certain election that has not yet taken place at the time of this writing, we turn our attention instead to the 100th anniversary of co-education in the Law School. In 1920, three white women were allowed to enroll in law classes for the first time, one of whom would go on to become the first woman to pass the Virginia State bar exam. It would be disingenuous to call this the true centennial of co-education considering it would take another fifty years before UVA Law would see its first black woman graduate (Elaine R. Jones in 1970, the first woman president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund) but we’re working with what we’ve got.
With this anniversary in mind, Virginia Law Women hosted their annual Women in Public Service event for 1Ls on October 27. The Zoom event was organized into three sections: an opening address from Dean Golobuff and Claire Gastañaga; a panel discussion where attendees chose between a discussion geared toward a career starting in public service or a career starting in private practice and transitioning later to public service; and small breakout sessions with panelists that attendees reserved ahead of time. The overall organization and transition was pretty seamless and handled by Maggie Woodward ’22 of VLW.
Pictured: Claire Gastañaga '74, Executive Director of ACLU Virginia, discussed a gamut of issues, including supporting women candidates for office. Photo Courtesy of acluva.org
Dean Goluboff (the Law School’s first female dean, if you didn’t know) kicked off the event with her usual positive energy. This year’s 1L class is the first class to enter as more than 50 percent women, one of her long-standing goals. Her short welcome was followed by a speech from Claire Gastañaga ’74 who serves as the executive director of ACLU Virginia. Gastañaga also serves on the Virginia State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and has been recognized as one of Virginia’s most outstanding advocates for LGBTQ+ rights. She is retiring from the ACLU in the spring, due in part to her desire to make room for the next generation of leaders.
Gastañaga devoted a good part of her speech to the issue of leadership, encouraging women to run for office themselves but also emphasizing the need to support women candidates. She highlighted the insidious issue so many women, people of color, LGBTQ+ and other minority candidates face: I want a candidate that is xyz . . . just not this candidate. It happened to both Warren and Clinton in their campaigns, when women across the country insisted they would prefer a female president . . . they just didn’t think this was the right female for the job. Quoting Gail Evans’s 2003 book She Wins, You Win, Claire emphasized, “Every woman must always play on the women's team . . . every time a woman succeeds, your chance of success increases. Every time a woman fails, your chance of failure increases.”
Given the strength of this philosophy, we followed up with Gastañaga after her talk to ask her feelings on the nomination of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Is a woman on the Supreme Court something to celebrate, regardless of her politics? Is there an inherent benefit to a woman having that place of leadership and lending her voice to the court? Do all women truly win when her nomination casts into doubt the future of affordable healthcare, LGBTQ+ rights, and access to safe abortions? Gastañaga in her speech mentioned the tension of supporting women while disagreeing with their politics; she reframed the question to be “not whether I would vote for any woman regardless of her position on issues I care about. The right question is why a person wouldn’t vote for a candidate who agrees with them on issues they care about just because that candidate is a woman.” In our email follow-up, Gastañaga voiced her concern that Justice Barrett (along with Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh) advised the Bush campaign in the 2000 case (you may have heard of it) Bush v. Gore. Gastañaga would like to see all three recuse themselves in a potential case of Trump v. Biden.
1Ls have the first draft of their major memo due this week, and so many attendees were happy to chat with Law Weekly about their experience instead of working on their drafts. Given another few inches of column space, this section would mostly consist of rave reviews for the free Root bowls provided by VLW for the event (and here this editor will admit to committing the great Zoom faux pas of joining a meeting with the camera off, as I was still wolfing down my own Red Chili Miso Tofu bowl) but the overall feeling was one of gratitude, and surprise.
“I think sometimes at UVA it can feel hard to want to go into a public service career because so many events are geared toward Big Law,” explained Whitney Carter ’23. “I really appreciated the opportunity to connect with other people who are interested in Public Service.” Logan White ’23 agreed: “I attended the ‘Starting in Public Service’ session and really enjoyed the panelist discussion—it was so helpful to have the chance to hear the concerns of other students that want to start in Public Service and get some real, straightforward advice from women who have already gone through it.” Dean Goluboff highlighted the classroom to career support system UVA provides for graduates looking to work in public service, including reimbursement for travel to interviews in addition to the more well-known loan forgiveness program. This was a pleasant surprise for Rachel Dalton ’23: “There were so many more resources available to us to help ease the transition into Public Service than I knew about.”
(Fun Law Weekly Fact: This honorable newspaper elected its first woman editor-in-chief in 1979.)
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dl9uh@virginia.edu