Keynote Address: The Women at the United States Supreme Court

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: THE WOMEN AT THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT

Judge Judith Chirlin: I don’t want to interrupt the networking that’s going on, and the fact that you are enjoying each other’s company, but we do have, as you know, a very special treat for our luncheon speaker, so I would like to introduce her. She is a woman who, probably a year and two months ago, most of us in the room had never heard of. Sorry. And as trial judges, we just read the opinions and sometimes don’t even pay attention to who wrote them. It’s just what we had to do.

But a little over a year and a half ago, Tani Cantil-Sakauye was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to be the Chief Justice of California. As you know, she is the second woman to have that position but the first Asian American. She has her bachelor’s and her J.D. from the U.C. system, from U.C. Davis. She is from the Sacramento area. She has something in common with Justice O’Connor, and that is when she got out oflaw school, she couldn’t get a legal job.

Now, she took a little bit of a different route than we heard from Justice O’Connor, because our Chief Justice became a dealer in the casinos in Reno, which, when I realized that, I thought, now I know why she’s able, so capably, to deal with all of the different personalities within the California judicial system.

For those of you who were at the National Association of Women Lawyers’ meeting yesterday, and heard the speaker from Warner Brothers talking about work-life balance, I