Judge Cynthia Hall: Her Decision Is to Be Active

I think what makes Cynthia seem so special to us is that she’s got all these old-fashioned American values, yet such a tremendous sense of fun.

--Elizabeth Burns, a long-time friend

Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals strode purposefully across Raymond Street in Pasadena, a tall, lean, long-legged figure in a blue and purple suit, an amethyst and turquoise pin wrapped in a gold sunburst and large amethyst earrings.

She’d lunched at Cafe Jacoulet and now was headed back to the court’s temporary offices at the Pasadena Mutual Savings building where there were still last-minute matters to clear up before leaving the next day for a monthlong bird-watching expedition in Malaysia.

Talking About Her Life

She paused to peer into an antique store at a 4-foot-high brass coiled cobra, saying wryly, “That’s what every home needs two of”--then marched on, talking about her 28-year-old daughter in New York and how she wished Desma would get married and have children; her husband of 10 years, John Hall, who died in a private plane crash in 1980, and how he was like “an encyclopedia who told jokes”; how there’s really no time on the court schedule for vacations “but I believe in vacations and that you should take them. So you just have to make the arrangements.”

Cynthia Holcomb Hall is one of those people who’s always known who she is and what she should be doing. She is, as several friends describe her, an indomitable individual: strong charactered, her values rooted in traditional American conservatism, intense about her interests, which are broad and eclectic.

Largest and Busiest

At 55, she is one of four women among 24 active judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the largest and busiest federal appeals court in the nation. It is a job requiring at least a quarter of each year on the road, as judges decide legal issues emanating from California, Alaska, Hawaii, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Washington. Hall was appointed to the court in November by President Reagan.

She also is a mother, photographer who takes night classes twice a week, an avid traveler to Asia, Afghanistan and other offbeat places, but she hasn’t been to Europe in 35 years. She is a bird watcher, gardener, tennis player and by her own description, a “party girl” who tries to confine her social life to just one night out during the week since she likes to be in bed by 11 so she can get in a little reading and still be in fine form for her 6:30 a.m. tennis game.

She lives alone (except for a graduate student recently brought in to occupy the maid’s room and house-sit during her travels) in a sprawling ‘50s-style ranch house in Pasadena. After her husband’s death, her father, retired Adm. Harold Holcomb, lived with her. He died in January. Her 13-year-old son Harris attends boarding school on the East Coast.

Cynthia Holcomb Hall’s life is not so much hectic as filled. As longtime friend and early morning tennis partner Annabella Dahl says: “she’s the only person I know who can have a schedule conflict at 6:30 in the morning. But if she does any less, she thinks she’s being lazy.”

Hall acknowledges that she has a high energy level, a family trait inherited from both her parents and passed on to her children. But more than that, there’s a sort of single-minded dedication about her, a sense of discipline and decisiveness.

Sending her son to boarding school, for instance. It was a decision made after her husband’s death as she took a long look at her options: the family’s financial needs (she’s also supporting John Hall’s four children by a prior marriage through college) and whether she could afford to stay on the court, whether returning to private practice would allow her to give a young son the attention he needed.

“I asked myself what do I want to do? I really like judging and I think I’m good at it. I decided we could make it financially if we reduced our standard of living. I knew that Harris should be raised in an environment with men in it, people who can play football, ski with him. And even if I devoted 100% of my time to him, I couldn’t give him everything he needed. Where he is now, he’s surrounded by other kids, which I think is better than living alone with his mother.

A Lot to Be Said

“There’s a lot to be said for boarding school--if you can bring yourself to do it.”

As for her career accomplishments, much of that seems more of a response to the situation at the time--rather than some great master plan.

Like the decision to go to law school: “I was certainly expected to go on to college. But I never thought I’d do anything else. But we lost a lot of friends during World War II and mother and daddy could see the problems of the widows, so it was felt I should get a skill, something I could fall back on. I was a French major at Stanford, so maybe he thought I’d teach French. But I knew I didn’t want to teach. . . . French, or law now, for that matter. So I looked at Stanford’s three graduate schools. Medicine was out. I faint at the sight of blood. Then there was business, but I was engaged to a business student and, well, that didn’t look too hot. So that left law, about which I knew nothing.”

She was admitted to Stanford Law School. “I was a good student,” she acknowledges. “But I was a butterfly. I loved to party.” A smile, followed by a laugh as she said, “and I haven’t changed.”

There was a two-year interruption after her first year at Stanford Law School when she was “voluntarily called to active duty” in the WAVES and was sent to Washington, a town and a time great for partying.

Then back to Stanford where, in the spring of her second year she married a fellow law student. Then, graduation from Stanford Law School in 1954 and “the law firms weren’t accepting women. They weren’t kidding about it. They were very up-front.” It was her first experience with discrimination and “I was very angry.”

But as luck would have it, Judge Richard Chambers of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was willing to take on a woman clerk. “I don’t know why,” Hall said. “Except he was a maverick and he had two daughters, so maybe he was more enlightened.”

She left Chambers to follow her husband, who had joined the Marines. Their daughter, Desma, was born at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia. Three years later, the couple divorced and Hall was alone with a daughter to support. No problem, she thought. After all, she’d passed both the California Bar and the Arizona Bar. Once again, she couldn’t get a job. So she hung out her shingle, as she put it, “and my mother’s friends sent their servants to me.”

Her practice not exactly prospering, the timing seemed perfect to follow up on a notion she’d had since her days as a law clerk: to get a master’s degree in taxation law from New York University. She applied and received the first fellowship that school ever awarded to a woman. She also received permission to live in the dorm, usually only given foreign women students. On the advice of her daughter’s pediatrician, she left Desma with her parents who were living in Scottsdale at the time. Desma joined her mother the following summer, also living in the dorm and having graduate students as baby sitters.

Now with her master’s degree, Hall decided she wanted to be a trial lawyer in the tax division of the Department of Justice in Washington. Her timing was good. That division traditionally kept one woman on staff and since the current woman was leaving, Hall could be hired.

She was a token? “Yes.”

How did this make Hall feel, and did it have any effect on her daughter?

A sore subject. “Well, she who has never been discriminated against is the most ardent feminist. I think it’s ridiculous. As it turned out, the government paid the same whether you were a man or woman, so that turned out all right.”

Benefited by Movement

Not that Hall is not a feminist. She is, she says, and she knows that the women’s movement benefited her personally since her appointment to the U.S. Tax Court in 1972 was the direct result of a search for a woman. “And I’m sure it didn’t hurt me when I was seeking a position on the district court. . . . I believe strongly in equal pay. I’m for the ERA. But I don’t want to disrupt a system that is a meritocracy. A woman shouldn’t get a job if there is a better qualified man.

“However, compared to Desma, I’m a Nazi.”

Desma Holcomb (she goes by her mother’s maiden name) won’t go that far. But true, Desma is as politically liberal as her mother is conservative and when it comes to feminism, “mother is go along, get along. I think between growing up in the middle of the women’s movement and knowing what she went through, I’m angry on her behalf. I think she (her mother) thinks if she’d been combative, she wouldn’t have gotten as far as she did.”

In the greater scheme of their relationship though, it’s clear politics are more of a conversational division between mother and daughter. Even the fact that Hall’s job in Washington required her to travel, leaving her young daughter with a baby sitter, may have resulted in a closer relationship between the two women.

“I’d call her every day when I came home from school,” said Holcomb, who’s a contract program specialist in the immigration and refugee program of the National Council of Churches in New York. “She was always there for me, but she also raised me to be very independent. Sometimes I think it’s hard for her to handle the results of the way she raised me, that I can take care of myself. I think taking care of yourself can be a hard thing for women to learn.”

What about her half-brother, Harris? Doesn’t he miss out by not being around his mother? “Well, maybe somewhat. But,” she said with a laugh, “he needs to climb a lot of mountains just to get to a normal energy level.”

Hall moved to Los Angeles in 1966, opening a practice in Beverly Hills with Richard S. Brawerman. She met John Hall when both were appearing in a series of law seminars around Southern California. “He was just right. He was my age, my profession. We were of the same religion, the same general philosophy, moral and political values. And as Desma said, he was the first man I’d seen who hadn’t tried to get rid of her.” John Hall and Cynthia Holcomb were married in 1970.

As a couple, say friends, the Halls were a sensational combination--each bringing out the best in each other, both viewing their marriage as a rare gift. As a couple, they also became a public controversy.

First, in 1972 when the Nixon Administration gave them a package deal: a 15-year term on the U.S. Tax Court for her and the post of deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for him. “Both of us being sent to Washington, D.C. . . . we were the first man-and-wife team and people looked at both of us drawing salaries from the government and said how could so much money be paid to one family.”

That furor was small scale, however, compared to the fuss when Hall left the Treasury Department, finding that a government salary would not cover his financial obligations. Thinking it over, Cynthia Hall decided she’d move back to Pasadena too, and commute to her tax court job. After all, she said in an interview at the time, being on the tax court “is a travel job by its nature because we almost never hold court in Washington.”

A number of the tax court judges were not pleased, especially when it was learned that John Hall would be heading the tax department of his law firm here. This was a conflict of interest, contended Hall’s detractors. Cynthia Holcomb Hall just might divulge confidential information about the court’s deliberations to her husband, giving his firm an advantage. One tax court judge even suggested that no married woman, not even a judge sworn to uphold the law, could keep secrets from her husband.

“The whole thing was absurd,” said Cynthia Hall as she recounted the incident. “There was even talk of disbarring John’s entire firm. John said that was great. Everyone would file with his firm because the cases wouldn’t go to court.” She laughed. “Nothing got him down. And I think he stiffened my back.

“No, I never thought about resigning. We decided we weren’t going to let a few old men run my life, tell me what to do. After all, they didn’t appoint me to the tax court. This was an appointment that came from the President.”

Eventually, the criticism died when Hall’s critics could find no authoritative body to make a decision on their charges. Hall continued the commute, spending most of her $42,000 salary on the costs incurred living in Pasadena and working in Washington. With the unexpected death of her husband, however, she reevaluated the situation. “I told my son now that daddy’s gone, I’ll stay home.”

Working Nights, Weekends

However, despite her appointment in 1981 to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, “I was still working nights and weekends, so it seemed the best solution was to send my son to boarding school.” And with her appointment in November to the U.S. Court of Appeals, a $76,000-a-year job, her travel schedule is more rigorous than ever.

The intellectual challenge though is greater than ever. Jobs like this, you just don’t turn down. Just as you wouldn’t turn down an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, though Hall contends, “That’s as likely to happen as my being hit by lightning.”

It’s a pragmatic approach to life. Take each day and work it for all it’s worth. And don’t let what might have been get you down. Cynthia Hall never articulates this, but the philosophy is clear as she takes a visitor through her house with the clutter of photographs and books, a photograph printer in her pink and gold bathroom, Asian art accumulated from various family members, her late husband’s desk piled with papers in her late father’s bedroom. For the first time in her life, Cynthia Hall is living alone and, she concedes, it’s strange to have no one who loves her to come home to. But that’s life and now there’s this trip to Malaysia and what could she eliminate to fit a month’s worth of clothes, her books on birds and camera equipment in two bags?

Is she happy? Does she have worries?

She glanced up abruptly. What a question.

“Yes, I think I’m happy. I’m fortunate. I have a job I like. I’m living comfortably. Worries? I worry about my son. He’s such a daredevil. He’s not as cautious as I’d like him to be. He skis so fast . . . but worries are a waste of time.”