Woman Just One of the Fellows

When Harvard asked Judith Richards Hope to recommend 15 women to serve on its governing board, she did not include her own name. But, as far as Harvard is concerned, she’s at the top of the list. The Board of Overseers of the Cambridge, Mass., school unanimously appointed Hope to be the first woman on the seven-member Harvard Corporation in its 352-year history. Members of the corporation, formally known as the Presidents and Fellows of Harvard, serve without pay for unlimited terms and make day-to-day decisions on educational, financial and institutional policies. “I’m really in awe,” Hope said. “It’s such an august body, I really was surprised.” Hope, 48, is a federal appellate judge nominee. She is the daughter-in-law of comedian Bob Hope and the mother of a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, Zachary Hope. The Ohio native, who was graduated from Wellesley College and Harvard Law School, is a partner in the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker with offices in Washington and Los Angeles. She was associate director of the White House Domestic Council under President Gerald R. Ford and vice chairman of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime during the Ronald Reagan Administration.

A recently married municipal court clerk and a police detective have come up against New Jersey Supreme Court directives that require one of them to quit to avoid a conflict of interest. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal court suit on behalf of Joseph Williams, a North Arlington detective, and clerk Marie Williams Hughes, arguing that the rules are unconstitutionally broad and interfere with the plaintiffs’ right to get married. Williams, as a detective, deals mainly with felony cases that are tried in Superior Court and has testified in municipal court once in the last five years, Paul Armstrong, a lawyer for the ACLU, said.

Biologists Edward B. Lewis of Caltech and John B. Gurdon of Britain’s Cambridge University were awarded the $100,000 1989 Wolf Prize in medicine for their work in molecular biology. Lewis, 70, a native of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., was recognized for studies of genes in fruit flies that might help explain some human birth defects. He has been a professor of biology at Caltech for 40 years. Gurdon, 55, a professor of cell biology, was cited for his work in frog genetics. The Wolf Foundation was set up in 1975 by the late Ricardo Wolf, a German-born chemist who served as Cuba’s ambassador to Israel.