The Early Years

by John Schlegel

The most distinctive thing about the Law School's first years was the excitement that the women students brought to the place. They were significantly different from their male fellow students. It was still a big deal then to be a female student in law school.

Women didn't begin to populate law schools heavily until about 1968, when the president drafted law students. And the law schools began saying, "Uh oh - we may be empty. We need other people."

They were feisty, the women students. They were extraordinarily perceptive. They brought a real energy to the place.

Dianne Bennett was in that group; she's now in practice in Buffalo. Denise O'Donnell is a U.S. attorney here. It wasn't so much anything specific they did, but that as a group they were vibrant, concerned, pushing people - forcing us to teach better.

It's extraordinary to me as I think back that of the students whose names come readily to mind, how many of them are women. I always think of the three women we knew as "The Huntington Girls." They lived on Huntington Avenue: Mary Francis Clark, Judy Sillari, and Cheryl Reich. They sort of fed off each other, and they showed a range of interest and life that was the place in those early years, around '77, '78. Mary Francis went off to become a tax attorney in Washington, D.C., and travelled a lot. Judy tried the SEC for a while and solo practice, and then I lost contact with her. Cheryl has been a criminal attorney doing a lot of drug work in New York City. The thing was their cheer, the way they took it seriously, and Judy Solari for having said something that has always captured my own experience. I am sort of a fearsome person, or so I am told by generations of students. After a particularly long class, Judy said, "Being afraid of Schlegel is like being afraid of the Wizard of Oz."

Another one of the female students who stands out is Hildy Neubauer. When Jan Lindgren and I were putting together materials for a course, she was our research assistant. She was one of the first people I know who mastered the technique of computerized research. We could send her away for things, and she would come back with them, and we'd ask how. She said, "Well, I just played with this machine." But the most extraordinary thing was the quality of the mind. We would send her away for something on a given topic that we wanted in the materials. She would come back with what we wanted, showing what she had found. But she would always say, "While I was looking, I found this. You might find it more interesting." It was always a better idea than what we had, an insight into what we were doing. And indeed, when we actually prepared the materials, we'd put her name on them. The thing that is most memorable is the way she would always say, "While I was looking": an active intelligence of the kind that one treasures when one finds it in law students.