Women Criminal Defense Lawyers: Evan Jenness Speaks Out

One of our colleagues, Evan Jenness, from Los Angeles, California, spoke up in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, candidly calling out the fact that the justices of the Supreme Court are engaging in biased conduct toward women and minority lawyers. She suggests that the Court should consider accepting blind briefing as a means to eradicate their practice of accepting petitions from a select few attorneys that are overwhelmingly white and male.

Her letter, along with others sent, were in reaction to an Editorial Board article entitled The Best Lawyers Money Can Buy, which discussed a recent Reuters report that exposed the reality that a small elite group of lawyers have the highest probability of arguing a case before the Supreme Court. The justices accept approximately 75 out of 10,000 petitions per year. And a shocking number of the petitions have a small elite group of lawyers names attached to them again and again. Reuters identified 66 lawyers who represented less than one half of 1 percent of all lawyers who petitioned the court during the report period from 2004 to 2012, but these 66 lawyers were involved in 43 percent of the cases the justices heard. And not shockingly the New York Times reported, “That elite cohort is as homogeneous as it is powerful: 63 of the 66 lawyers were white, 58 were men, and 51 worked for firms with primarily corporate clients.”

There is nothing new about these kind of statistics, but when you consider the significance and importance that access to the Supreme Court has for a practicing lawyer, the fact that women don’t have equal access is disturbing to say the least. We should all be speaking up and against this kind of inherent bias against women in law. Thanks to Evan Jenness for speaking out so candidly about this important issue.