Public Interest

Who Was Clara Shortridge Foltz?

Have you ever heard this story of a truly impressive lawyer?

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Last week, the National Legal Aid and Defender Association held its annual conference. At the conference, the Orleans Public Defenders from New Orleans, Louisiana (whom I’ve covered before, here and here) won the Clara Shortridge Foltz Award for “outstanding achievement in the provision of services to indigent defendants.” Kudos to the Orleans Public Defenders for turning a maybe-constitutionally-deficient lack of funding into legal lemonade!

For reasons unknown, when I learned of this particular award, the name attached to it jumped out at me more than its recipient did. I wondered: who is, or was, Clara Shortridge Foltz? So I looked to answer that question, and am I ever glad I did. Sometimes, public interest lawyers, life and the law and the iniquities of both might get you down. You might need a little inspiration. So read on to find out just who Clara Foltz was — and get inspired.

There are plenty of places I could start, but I like 1878 as the key inflection point in Foltz’s life. In that year, Foltz found herself in San Jose, California (a time when the population there was maybe about 12,000), in the midst of a “severe economic depression,” with five children to take care of, her husband having left her for a mistress in Portland, Oregon. Yikes. So what did she do? Naturally, she eschewed her background in “boarding, sewing, and teaching,” and instead took up a career as a public speaker arguing for women’s suffrage.

Foltz had higher ambitions, however, and apparently felt that becoming a lawyer would be the best way to realize those ambitions. She began to study the law. But she faced a problem: at the time, California law only allowed “any white male citizen” to become a lawyer.

So rather than accept the risks and delays of litigation, Foltz took her case to the legislature with a bill that would replace the words “any white male citizen” with “any citizen or person.” She traveled to Sacramento and lobbied in person, writing later (as reported by Stanford Law Professor Barbara Babcock, who, by the way, is the source of every morsel of Clara Foltz history I found on the internet): “I coaxed, I entreated, I almost went down on my knees before them, asking for the pitiful privilege of an equal chance to earn an honest living in a noble profession! I would have reasoned had they been reasonable men. But I had to beg — not for a living, but to be allowed to earn a living.”

Her begging paid off, as the Woman Lawyer’s Bill (as it was called) first passed the California Senate, then passed the Assembly, and finally received the Governor’s signature.

Naturally, Foltz took advantage of the newly revised laws governing attorney admissions in California, sitting for the next administration of the bar examination — then a grilling by three seasoned attorneys. Foltz was questioned for three hours, twice the customary length of the exam (a 90-minute bar exam in California — can you imagine?), and passed. The next day, September 5, 1878, she became the first woman lawyer in California.

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Groundbreaking, yes — but that accomplishment is not what makes Foltz impressive.

Professor Babcock suggests that, being the first woman lawyer in California, Foltz had access only to a very limited set of potential clients: “the only people desperate enough to turn to a woman lawyer were poor people accused of crime, and women wanting divorces.” It was the former category that led to Foltz’s groundbreaking work.

Foltz went to court on behalf of her criminal clients and found the deck stacked against them: some prosecutors were paid for victories; others were tipped by the victims of crimes if they won; the regular players in the criminal courts were “deadened in feeling by constant contact” with a broken system. And all of them resented her. In Professor Babcock’s words, “prosecutors routinely attacked both Foltz and her client — him for his alleged crime and her for doing the dirty, unfeminine work of representing criminals.” This sparked in Foltz’s mind the notion that there ought to be a government official, with a status equal to the prosecutor’s, but charged with representing those accused of crimes.

Foltz turned her idea into speeches. Most famously, at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, she explained: “Let the criminal courts be reorganized upon a basis of exact, equal and free justice; let our country be broad and generous enough to make the law a shield as well as a sword.” She wrote articles that were published in newspapers and law reviews around the country. She successfully pushed for the creation of public defenders’ offices, with the first in the nation established in Los Angeles in 1913. And she drafted a public defender bill that she brought to legislatures around the country — in 1921, for example, it was passed in California as the “Foltz Defender Bill.”

Foltz had other stories and successes that are worth reading about. (And you can read about them in relatively small doses at any of the links above — or you can tackle the whole story in Professor Babcock’s book about Foltz). But to become the first woman lawyer in California, to establish the legal and intellectual foundation for public defenders in the United States, and then to actually see public defenders’ offices built on that foundation — and all that as a single mother of five children — now that’s truly inspiring.

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Sam Wright is a dyed-in-the-wool, bleeding-heart public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government. If you have ideas, questions, kudos, or complaints about his column or public interest law in general, send him an email at PublicInterestATL@gmail.com.

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