PLATFORM : Humanizing Courts
The president of Ireland, MARY ROBINSON, spoke to the National Assn. of Women Judges on her recent U.S. visit, at the time of the Clarence Thomas hearings in the Senate. Robinson, who is a lawyer, declined direct comment on sexual harassment accusations against Thomas, but told the association at its meeting in Chicago:
In a very few generations, we as lawyers and you as judges have been privileged to witness the progress of women from being recipients and objects of the law to interpreters of it and agents of change within it. In your courts and in all of our experience, we know there are people who perceive the law not as a source of protection but as a terrifying ordeal. It is part of the challenge that we face and accept as women and law enforcers that we can persuade them to look again.
I think our sense of society and our collective and individual experience equips us to understand the inarticulate and the defenseless. It enables us to divide the true authority of the law from its authoritarian aspects.
Women judges have in this generation an invaluable contribution to make. Not to feminize the courts and the law, but to humanize them.
Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter
Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond. In your inbox three times per week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
