Honoree Profile: Lynn Hecht Schafran

Lynn Hecht Schafran left her first career working in art museums in 1971 to become a lawyer working for women's rights. In summer 1972 she was a Public Interest Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights where she had the good fortune to work with two other VFA honorees, Rhonda Copelon and Jan Goodman.

Their cases dealt with abortion rights and sex discrimination against the maids at Columbia University, where Schafran was at law school. That fall her good fortune increased when Ruth Bader Ginsburg came to teach at Columbia Law School, the first woman tenured professor there.

As a student in Professor Ginsburg's Women and the Law course, Schafran had the opportunity to research sections of briefs for what became landmark Supreme Court decisions at last interpreting the Constitution's equal protection clause to protect women. In Bader Ginsburg's Clinical Research Seminar on Sex-Based Discrimination and the Law and at the ACLU Women's Rights Project, which Ginsburg founded, Schafran worked with her on cases about issues ranging from a Wisconsin schoolteacher's right to keep her birth name to the use of sex segregation as a screen for race discrimination in a Louisiana secondary-school system.

Bader Ginsburg also made Schafran aware of the impact on women of exclusion from important business-oriented "private" clubs and organizations such as the Jaycees and Rotary. Schafran's work in these early years led to her involvement in legislation and litigation to end this exclusion and to her becoming Vice Chair of the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, Chair of the Committee on Sex and Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and in 1981 through the present, Director of the National Judicial Education Program to Promote Equality for Women and Men in the Courts at Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), the country's oldest legal advocacy organization for women and girls. She has received numerous awards for her work to eliminate gender bias in the courts.

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