Aaron Freiwald, Managing Partner of Freiwald Law and host of the weekly podcast, Good Law | Bad Law, is joined by law professor, Patricia A. Cain, of Santa Clara University School of Law, to discuss sex discrimination, glass-ceilings, and the incredible women law professors who broke down barriers throughout history; Professor Cain is the editor of the newly released book, Paving the Way: The First American Women Law Professors, a book that follows the first wave of trailblazing female law professors and the stage they set for American democracy. The late Herma Hill Kay, of Berkeley, is the author of the book while the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the foreword.
In today’s episode, Aaron and Pat delve into this special project, one that Justice Ginsburg advocated for tirelessly and admired publicly in the years before her death. Herma Hill Kay, former Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and Ginsburg’s close professional colleague, wrote Paving the Way to tell the stories of the first fourteen female law professors at ABA- and AALS-accredited law schools in the United States. Kay, who became the fifteenth such professor, labored over the stories of these women in order to provide an essential history of their path for the more than 2,000 women working as law professors today and all of their feminist colleagues.
Dean Kay passed away in 2017 and our guest, Pat Cain, ensured the completion of this important work. Pat explains that each woman’s story is wrapped in rich historical context and that their perseverance through extraordinarily difficult times must never be forgotten. Paving the Way is not just a collection of individual stories of remarkable, strong, motivated women but also a well-crafted interweaving of law and society during a historical period when women’s voices were often not heard and sometimes actively muted.
The final chapter of this book connects these first fourteen women to the “second wave” of women law professors who achieved tenure-track appointments in the 1960s and 1970s, carrying on the torch and analogous challenges. Pat and Aaron recount some of these stories in today’s conversation and explain what these women can teach us and what their profound impact has been on society, culture, democracy and the law.
Professor Cain is a national expert in federal tax law and sexuality and the law. She has published numerous law review articles, essays, and book reviews on various topics, including federal taxation of installment sales, tort law, the role of judges, feminist legal theory, and the history of the LGBT rights movement. Her area of specialization is taxation and estate planning for same-sex couples and she frequently lectures on this topic at state and national continuing legal education programs.
A graduate of Vassar (A.B.) and the University of Georgia (J.D.), Professor Cain began her law teaching career at the University of Texas in 1974, where she was a member of the faculty for 17 years. She then joined the law faculty at the University of Iowa, where she held the Aliber Family Chair in Law and the Vice Provost position. She became a member of the Santa Clara faculty in 2007.
To learn more about Professor Cain, please visit her bio here.
To check out the new book, Paving the Way: The First American Women Law Professors, please click here.
To learn more about the book’s author, Herma Hill Kay, please click here.
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