Sarah Weddington on being a young, female lawyer in a watershed SCOTUS case that reverberates today
Sarah Weddington wasn’t the first to know that she’d won the landmark abortion-rights case Roe v. Wade at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Giving the keynote speech at Saturday’s American Bar Foundation Awards Reception and Banquet, Weddington recalled a call her assistant received on Jan. 22, 1973. A reporter from the New York Times called to ask if Weddington had a comment on the case.
“And my assistant said, ‘Should she?’” Weddington recalled.
As it turned out, Weddington had won the case 7-2. The case (decided with a Georgia case, Doe v. Bolton) was a watershed that defined a legal right to privacy, legalized abortion and triggered a fervent debate in the ensuing decades over the procedure that has shaped our nation’s politics.
Weddington who was 26 during the first oral argument in Roe, is believed to be the youngest attorney to successfully argue a case before the high court—although, as she observed in her speech, “they don’t ask you how old you are.” She was also among a small number of female advocates before the court. She recalled that in the early 1970s, there was no women’s restroom attached to the lawyers’ lounge; she had to go to the basement.
Weddington went on to become the first female general counsel for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an assistant to President Jimmy Carter, a Texas state legislator and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Her speech Saturday night ended with Roe, but ranged across her experience and included plenty of humor. She also spoke extensively about leadership, a focus of her teaching and her current work through the Weddington Center.
The reception, held in a historic train station attached to Minute Maid Park in downtown Houston, included presentations of several honors from the ABF. Benjamin H. Hill III of Tampa’s Hill Ward Henderson, an ABF Life Patron Fellow, received the group’s 2015 Outstanding Service Award.
Professor Stephen Gillers of the NYU School of Law, a legal ethics expert who served on the ABA’s Commission on Ethics 20/20, received the 2015 Outstanding Scholar Award.
The organization’s Outstanding State Chair Award was shared by two Baltimorians, current Maryland state chair Ava Lias-Booker of McGuire Woods and immediate past chair Kevin L. Shepherd of Venable LLP, both in Baltimore.
And an award for Distinguished Career in Research, in Memoriam went posthumously to Professor Theodore Eisenberg, who died last year after 33 years at Cornell Law School. Professor Valerie Hans of Cornell accepted the award on his behalf, saying Eisenberg pioneered the use of statistical analysis in legal research.
