Constance Baker Motley Quotes
I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.
Motley, Constance Baker. Equal Justice Under Law: An Autobiography. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
The dramatic thing about this quotation is that in public, the mantra of conservatives about the courts of America is that they make and change laws as opposed to just interpreting and clarifying the laws. They traditionally accuse judges who rule against their favorite positions as using the courts as an instrument of political and social change. Here a leading conservative federal jurist, who thereafter became a member of the Supreme Court, was acknowledging and advocating the courts as instruments for conservative social, economic, and political change.
Perhaps this is one of the reasons American society is so litigious.
Constance Baker Motley, was a key strategist of the civil rights movement, lawyer, judge, state senator, and Borough President of Manhattan, New York City. She obtained a role with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund before entering law school as a staff attorney and continued her work with the organization for more than twenty years. She argued 12 landmark civil rights cases in front of the Supreme Court, winning nine. She was a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, aiding him in the case Brown v. Board of Education. Baker Motley was also the first African-American woman appointed to the federal judiciary, serving as a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Motley died on September 28, 2005 in New York City of congestive heart failure.
