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View Comments On March 24, 1911, the day before the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City which left 147 dead the New York Court of Appeals had declared the state’s compulsory worker’s compensation law unconstitutional. Largely because of the fire, that law was back in force in 1913. Elmira’s own Crystal Eastman had drafted that worker’s compensation law. According to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Eastman was one of only a few hundred women lawyers in the early twentieth century. . Her pioneering report, Work Accidents and the Law (published in book form in 1910), led New York Gov. Charles Evans Hughes to appoint her the first woman on New State’s Commission on Employer’s liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor in 1909. As a member of that commission, Eastman drafted the country’s first workers’ compensation law. That legislation became the model for workers’ compensatio ....