Where were you and what actually got you connected to the Civil Rights Movement . Deborah i read a book by richard cougar called social justice which was about brown versus the board of education and it was a gripping narrative. And i thought, that is what i wanted to do. Brian where were you . Deborah oh, i was a High School Student in chicago. Brian was there any person in your family deborah no. Brian nobody in your family was a lawyer . Deborah no, nobody thought it was a good idea. Brian where did you go . Deborah i went to yale law school. Brian what was it like at the time . Deborah there wasnt a lot of women. In my class, there was maybe 13 women. Most of the great lawyers were, of course, all men. Brian what did you notice about being a woman in law school at yale . Deborah how little notice i gave to it, really, and this is in retrospect. What is startling to me now is just how law and life were. There was discrimination everywhere, but it wasnt often talked about in law school. Brian did you have any women professors . Deborah no. Brian lets talk about it today. Lets talk about the numbers. Deborah it has changed dramatically from when i went to law school. Brian why are women half of the law school . What changed . Deborah the culture. You know . And expectations about women and the profession and of course, the law itself, it was the product of some early efforts to create as a discrimination lawsuits for women, and that was sufficient. So we are a litigious bunch and we sued a lot of people to open some doors. And the vietnam war brought a lot of change in deferment, so the president of harvard was famous for saying now we have the blind, the lame, and the women. Boost schools got a big during that period. Brian how long have you taught in the classroom . Deborah oh, about 35 years now. Brian what do you notice about women law students versus men law students . What is different . Deborah they dont talk as much, especially in big classes. And that is not just true at stanford, but it is across a variety of institutions and pretty much every study that has been done about classroom participation that it varies somewhat in size to the class, but in general as Sheryl Sandberg would say, women dont lean in and they are not vying for your attention. Brian what about you . Deborah i never talked in law school in a big class. Brian is there a difference between how the men write and the women write . Deborah no. I dont see a gender difference. Little classes, the classes i know. But i dont see a gender difference. Brian your book is called the trouble with lawyers, which we will get to in a minute, but i want to show you video from an author who went to Harvard Law School and he now just writes for a living, and i want to hear him back in 2007 about what he says about being a lawyer. Brian now why did you leave law . I was about the worst person ever suited for law. I went into law school believing that lawyers did what they did on the Television Show l. A. Law. There were romantic, spectacular cases every week and it involved celebrity cases and it was all very glamorous and romantic, and when i got to law school, it took me about two or three days to realize that much of the practice of law was about dotting the is and crossing the ts and all of that. Being careful and avoiding disasters. I stuck out the degree but i was fundamentally as miserable as a person could have been. Brian he is actually from chicago also and he practiced law in chicago also but he has not done that for a long time. What did you hear there . Deborah law in realtime and law in primetime are very different. A lot of students go to law school for the wrong reasons, and it should not win by default. I only scans people if they think about law as a career that they should do something lawrelated first and to see if they are wellsuited for it. Brian what did you do after you left law school . Deborah i clerked for a justice, Justice Thurgood marshall in the Appellate Court and in the federal Circuit Court of appeals in new york and then i went directly into teaching. Brian let me show you this video of Thurgood Marshall, who became a justice, i believe in 1957, and you clerked for him for one year. Deborah 1978. Brian what was happening that year . Deborah we had an affirmative action case that was important and an Abortion Case that was important. We had a wonderful case where he wrote the denial about a librarian and a janitor who were fired because they were living together in a small town. Brian here he is in 1988. Justice marshall i have been watching those around here and those who came and i am so impressed with those who were around in the good old days. You know, you talk now about lawyers and lawyers fees and these things, and you know, when i was running the job that the most we could give any lawyer was 25 a day. Now they need about 24,000. As a matter of fact, i dont know what fees they get. Brian you write about fees in your book, but what about Thurgood Marshall. What you are member about your experiences . Deborah he was wonderful to clerk for, just his stories of the Civil Rights Movement alone made the experience wonderful. You know, he just had a real sense of justice and you know, that is kind of what took me to law in the first instance. So it is very great to be at the knees of a very great lawyer. Brian i looked up some statistics for clerks under Thurgood Marshall. He had about 53 clerks. 24 of them are from harvard, 13 from yale, and then there were others from all over the place, from georgetown, from georgia, from texas. You were from yale. What does this say about the kind of folks who end up clerking . Deborah well, the one question he had asked me in my interview is that i have read all of the opinions that i could put my hands on. He looked at my resume and looked down at me and said, so, i see you were a phi beta kappa. Do with your key . And i said, well, i gave it to my mother. And he laughed and he took chances and he had quite a smattering from schools that he thought would produce well. The other thing that i should note though from a marshall is at a time when a number of the Supreme Court justices werent taking any women, he had two. Brian so in the end and this is a question how do you show somebody like a Supreme Court justice that you are smart . Deborah you work really hard. Brian but he didnt know when he interviewed you. What do you say deborah in the interview it is not about being smart but if you have some decent people skills and if you have a sense of humor and he had a Screening Committee that looked at all of the resumes and the letters of recommendation and screened for smart, so by the time you got an interview with him, it wasnt so much about that. Brian you clerked as you said for a number of judges and then for Thurgood Marshall. When all of those experiences were over, what have you learned that you would not have learned had you not done the clerkship . Deborah oh, you know, an enormous amount. I think i was struck by one thing, and my husband at the time was working for the department of justice for something called the office of improvements and the administration of justice, and one of the tasks in that job was to write up a draft testimony for senators and representatives on various bills that the Justice Department was putting through. And of course, that testimony would get submitted to the record, and you know, legislative intent and i as a Supreme Court clerk would say that congress clearly intended this, and it was kind of a never never land, i dont know how many congressmen had actually read that testimony and whether that was really their intent, and so it gave me a dose of realism about the process that i otherwise would not have had. Brian how political was the court . Deborah i dont think it was political at the time, but there were strong divisions of views. Marshall and brennan and stevens were holding up the liberal end. Brian what evidence do you have that it is more political today . Deborah well, you know, i think there are just more polarized decisions in which you just know that it is going to be 54 and the only question is, which way is the swing vote going . I think that has been true of some recent decisions. In cases like bush v. Gore, probably being the greatest example of one where it is hard to think that that was decided in a political vacuum. Brian does that include both sides making the decision . Deborah oh sure. Brian did you see that very often when you were there, when Thurgood Marshall would predict how he was going to go on a case before you even asked him . Deborah on some cases you knew because he had his principles. You knew how he was going to come out on the race case or on a Death Penalty case. I mean, he didnt believe in the Death Penalty. You know, he got above his share of cases that he used to jokingly put or would have the least impact on the fewest possible people, because the chief justice from then, war and berger, would punish you and we used to have a little betting pool as to which would be the worst case and he would go to congress and say, i am going to try and get that one for you. Brian your book, called the trouble with lawyers, published by oxford, um, whats the point . The trouble with lawyers. You are one deborah i think our profession is we have deep troubles. The trouble on the top of my list is the access to justice. You know, we have the worlds highest concentration of lawyers in one of the least accessible and one of the most expensive systems in the world. 4 5 of the legal needs of poor people and middle income people are being met. Are not being met. When you look at world rankings, we are 67th, right there with uganda, in terms of access to justice. You know, we price law out of the pockets for ordinary americans. Brian here is the former attorney general eric holder back in 2010. Eric holder today, despite the decades that have gone by, many cases have yet to be fully translated into reality. That is a fact. But you already know this. All of you have read the reports and all of you know the data. Many of you have learned this truth in the hardest of ways i by experiencing it on the ground. You have seen how to many of our counties and into many of our communities, some people accuse us of crimes, including juveniles, they may never, may never have a lawyer. Brian how did the public defender system work . Deborah if you are indigent, and about 2 3 of the defendants in criminal cases are too poor to afford a lawyer, you get one assigned, and it can either be a public defender which is paid for by the state, or a can be someone who is contracted to provide a service for low income individuals, and you get a statutory fee, which is typically capped at ludicrous levels so that effective representation is a recipe for financial disaster for most practicing criminal attorneys. So they have to cut corners. Brian who is or who will be a public defender . Deborah people who care about justice. I worked as an intern in the public defender service. I thought that was maybe what i would do with my life and i have the greatest respect for people who work under very difficult circumstances. Huge caseloads, and they do as good a job as they do, but they we dont provide nearly anywhere near enough lawyers to cope with the rising number of individuals who are entitled to lawyers. Brian you say in your book that there should be more government funding for lawyers. Deborah yes. Brian who that would be entitled to it . If somebody committed a crime, would they get a free lawyer . Deborah no, we would still have the same test for indigency, but there wouldnt be 5000 cases on the caseload docket. You could pay lawyers at a rate that would work out at the minimum wage per hour if he put a serious amount of time into the investigation of the case. Brian what are the chances that you will see more money coming from the taxpayers to lawyers . Deborah we are moving in the wrong directions on that. The appropriation vote for criminal defense has dropped and the only way i think to seriously change it is for the courts to step in and to demand more resources for effective representation in criminal cases and more context in which people can get appointed lawyers in civil cases. Brian the latest statistic that i have seen about washington, d. C. , is that about one in 12 people here are lawyers. There are people here who make over 1000 per hour. What is the average public defender paid for doing that kind of work . Deborah now, you know i havent looked at that recently, but it is a small fraction of that amount. Brian are you talking 10 an hour . Deborah no, it is a living wage, but the disparity between people make in the corporate sector and the Public Sector has widened in the last decade. Brian you are here in washington, one in 12 people here in town are lawyers. Deborah i think it gives congress a deluded sense about how much law is readily available to americans, but there are plenty of counties in america where there are no lawyers. Brian plenty of counties . Deborah yeah, we are radically underrepresented in Rural America. Brian what do you do in Rural America . Deborah you go to the next county. Brian do you deserve a public defender . Deborah yes, you do. Brian when you were here as a clerk, at some point he became a staff person up on capitol hill during the impeachment proceedings of bill clinton. When did you do that and why did you do that and where were you right before that . Deborah well, i was a law professor at stanford and my two areas of specialties were gender and law and apparently someone did a search and the thought that two things that they were going to need during the impeachment proceedings were people who were good at ethics and gender. Nobody wanted a repeat of the anita hill situation in which liberal congressmen were thought to have allowed her to go on the stand and people will worried about that with Monica Lewinsky. They wanted a better process. So they wanted somebody with some expertise in ethics and gender. I took a leave. I had to refuse an opportunity how could i refuse an opportunity like that . Brian who did you work for . Deborah i worked for the house judiciary committee. It was for the committee but i was on the democratic side. Brian who was the top democrat . Deborah uhhh brian or who did you answer to when you were there . Deborah i answer to the chief counsel for the democrats more than the but conyers was the ranking democrat at the time. He was great. Brian what did you think of close when you saw this . Where were you deborah i was really shocked at how political it was all the way down. I had majored in Political Science as an undergraduate and what i saw and what played out were just so vastly different. I will give you one illustration. We spent a lot of time during the first few weeks reading the tapes of the interviews, and the appropriations for the committee were controlled by the republicans. And so the republican staff had offices and secretaries and, you know, all of the comforts that you would expect to go with this investigation. And we had half as many people as they did and no office, and a secretary, no telephone and we were all outside of the little secure room where the tapes were being held, and it was some night when we are going through this. We were sitting on the floor and we were on our cell phones and one of the members of the committee came by and saw us there and said, what are you all doing on the floor . And the chief counsel looked at him and said, i wish you guys would win some elections so you could get us some chairs. And that was just how tough it was and the hearings were just so politicized that hyde would call witnesses and we would hear about it on television from cspan, you know, rather than getting any kind of formal notice. Brian what was your feeling than about the issue itself and the Monica Lewinsky versus bill clinton . Did there seem to be any reason to have the impeachment process . Deborah no, there was no reason for it. I mean, it was all political. Totals all the way down, as they say. Turtles all the way down, as they say. You know, there was a lot of his conduct there was not to like, but it was not an impeachable offense. Brian i saw something today and i wanted to get your take on it because of your involvement in all of this. This is what is coming up now in this political season. You no doubt have heard about a writer who has been writing for salon over the years. Camille paglia. This is an interview that i saw today for the first time. She said that the horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the u. S. , led by gloria steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to bill clintons behavior, because he was a democrat. The democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didnt matter what his personal behavior was. What are your thoughts on this . Deborah i dont think it mattered as to behavior, but what it did for womens issues is something that certainly rallied people to his defense when he was called upon to answer for conduct that a lot american president s had carried on in private. So, you know, as i say, there was a lot not to like in his conduct, but it wasnt an impeachable offense. Brian and you deal with this generational the time, and she suggest that things have changed dramatically from the attitude back then to the attitude now. What is your opinion on that . Deborah well, you know, 80 of americans were polled and they wanted to know whether the president had an affair or not, and my own view is, yeah, there are some context in which the conduct is so egregious, very hard to follow a womanizer in the media and one person said, there is nothing here and you wont find a thing. And of course, they did find a few things. So that is i think, disqualifying. There is poor judgment that you dont want in the leader of the free world, but there was absolutely no correlation between fidelity in marriage and effective presidencies. I mean, Richard Nixon was by all accounts an ideal husban