Women's Issues

This Pioneering Black Woman Lawyer Can Really Tell You What 'Justice' Means

That people today are more interested in what justice means will hopefully make them more aware of injustice and willing to speak out about it.

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It’s the usual end of the year set of lists: best (and worst) movie, books, plays, music, whatever else comes to mind in the arts. There’s Time Magazine’s person of the year (already announced) and the word of the year. There’s rarely consensus on any of these choices, and this year is no exception. Word of the year? Oxford Dictionaries chose the word “toxic,” and Merriam-Webster chose the word “justice,” which beat out “nationalism” and “pansexual.”

Why “justice?” Perhaps because there were so many examples of justice and its antonym “injustice” in 2018 that people couldn’t help but want to suss out how the word “justice” is defined.  Merriam-Webster said that “justice” was looked up on its website 74 percent more times than in the previous year.

I think that word choice is a good thing and I am heartened at this year’s end that there has been a huge spike in people looking up the word to see what it means and how it’s defined.  Perhaps the idea of an informed citizenry still exists.

So, how does Merriam-Webster define “justice”? Here’s how: It has a number of different meanings, depending upon the context. It can mean the administration of justice (meting out justice, social justice); it also means the quality of being just, fair, impartial, it can mean the administration of law (i.e., the determination of rights in law or equity); it can mean the correctness of a ruling or a decision, that it conformed to truth, face, or reason.

Whether you agree with these definitions or not, the fact that people are asking what justice means, questioning their own views of justice based upon the world around them, is encouraging people to think for themselves about issues of justice, or lack thereof, as the case may be. That can’t be anything but positive news in these gloomy days (and yes, my 401k is now a 201k, which is why dinosaur lawyers will have to be dragged out kicking and screaming, clutching any piece of furniture they can hold on to, as many have to take their first required minimum distribution now or in the near future and there’s nothing much to take). Move over, millennials, we dinosaurs are not done yet.

Although we would like to think that justice is immutable, it isn’t. As a dinosaur woman lawyer (just passed the 42nd year of admission to practice), I am fascinated by stories of women lawyers who had to fight even harder than my generation has had to fight, those women seeing justice or not through the lens of their own experiences. And as hard as it still is today, just think about what it was like for a black woman lawyer in the 1930s and succeeding decades.

One of them is Eunice Hunton Carter, an African-American lawyer whose prosecutorial strategy brought down the most powerful Mafia leader in the 1930s, Lucky Luciano.

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Ms. Carter is the subject of a new biography by her grandson, Stephen L. Carter, a Yale law professor and author of a number of books. Titled Invisible, the book hopefully makes his grandmother’s story invisible no more.

The book’s subtitle explains some, but not all of the book: “The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.” But the story is more than just that; it is the story of a black woman lawyer who, through ambition, perseverance and circumstances, reinvented her life and her career over and over again. It was not ever easy.

A graduate of Smith College and Fordham School of Law, Ms. Carter knew “injustice” just as well as “justice.” Appointed to the Thomas Dewey task force to rid New York City of mob influence, she had the immense satisfaction of being the strategist whose efforts ultimately resulted in mobster Lucky Luciano’s conviction and imprisonment.

In the 1930s, there were few woman prosecutors, perhaps a couple dozen in the entire country and only a handful of black women. Dewey hired 20 prosecutors — 19 white males and Ms. Carter.

However, even though she was the brains behind the prosecution, she played no part in the trial. She was told no when she asked if she could have a role in the pretrial preparation of significant witnesses. Sound familiar even today?

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Ms. Carter was paid less than every other attorney on Dewey’s task force. As the only woman on it, she was relegated to “women’s issues” — prostitution and other similar crimes — but it was prostitution and the Mob that ran it which formed the basis for the successful Luciano prosecution. It took much persuasion and the backing of white male prosecutors to get Dewey to pay attention to Ms. Carter’s theory of the Luciano case.

In a subsequent high-profile prosecution of New York City’s most powerful Democrat, Dewey chose only white men to assist him. Sound familiar even today? Among other things, she aspired to a judgeship and never received it, although the fact that her estranged brother was an outspoken Communist in the years of the Red Scare probably had much to with that.

In a 1937 speech to the Howard University Alumnae Club, Ms. Carter’s remarks presaged the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. “There are men who exact from women a personal relationship of a rather intimate nature in order that the women may feel secure in their jobs. Boiling in oil is just a little too good for those kind of men.” So stipulated. What has changed in 80 years except that people are no longer boiled in oil, at least not that I’m aware of?

That people today are more interested in what justice means will hopefully make them more aware of injustice and willing to speak out about it. Ms. Carter’s life story is the story of both.

old lady lawyer elderly woman grandmother grandma laptop computerJill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for more than 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at oldladylawyer@gmail.com.

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