The American Bar Endowment s Opportunity Grant Program will again support a number of causes, including advocating for children who are deaf and hard of hearing, improving access to the courts for women in prison and ensuring due process for immigrants and asylum-seekers.
Women in the Law
Women’s success in legal careers: Lack of advancement is not a woman problem, it’s a profession problem
By Patricia Lee Refo
ABA President Patricia Lee Refo. Photo courtesy of ABA Media Relations.
A June 29 ABA Journal column by Susan Smith Blakely titled “Are women lawyers paying enough attention to upward mobility?” offered opinions that are antithetical to the core beliefs and principles of the American Bar Association.
The lack of upward mobility by women in the profession is not because women are not putting in the time and effort, nor is it because they are distracted by other concerns in their lives. Legal employers have plenty of systemic issues that need to be faced head-on when it comes to the promotion and retention of women attorneys. Blaming women attorneys is appalling.
From Staff Reports
ADRIAN Victims of sexual assault will have a new, online reporting system being piloted in Adrian.
The Catherine Cobb Safe House and the Adrian Police Department are partnering with End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI) and VictimsVoice to create a self-guided, online interviewing tool for sexual assault victims to report to law enforcement, a news release said. The project is funded through an American Bar Endowment (ABE) 2021 Opportunity Grant, one of 15 awarded across the United States.
The tool, which will be piloted in Adrian and Jacksonville, Forida, then distributed to the rest of the country, will be a software widget that can be installed on websites of police departments, sexual assault advocacy centers and other organizations, the release said. It will guide sexual assault survivors through a detailed police interview, following trauma-informed principles and best practices in the field. Survivors will be able to access this