“We wowed them on Fifth Avenue tonight,” said Eileen FitzGerald Sudler ’74, chair of the Dean’s Strategic Council and member of the Campaign Steering Committee, as she and committee comember Kenneth Raisler ’76 introduced the specifics of the campaign. Marking the end of the campaign’s silent fund-raising phase, during which some $165 million was raised, the gala ushered in the public phase by identifying the Law School’s plans for expanding student aid and supporting numerous faculty projects. The money raised—more than $200 million by last spring—will fund scholarships for both J.D. and LL.M. candidates, and help endow the school’s distinctive Loan Repayment Assistance Program and summer public interest grants, allowing students to explore and then pursue highly competitive yet low-paying jobs that contribute to the greater good. Campaign funds will also be used to hire new faculty, increase the number of chaired professorships and support the work of the Law School’s faculty-run centers and institutes. Finally, the campaign aims to increase alumni participation and to double the size of annual cash gifts.

“In a remarkably short span of time, NYU School of Law has moved into the small handful of schools at the very top tier of legal education,” said Dean Richard Revesz. “We have achieved this great success by pursuing a distinctive path in legal education. The campaign will ensure that we continue on this steep trajectory.”

The founder of the progressive AnBryce Scholarship and the campaign’s chair, Trustee Anthony Welters ’77, spoke about the sense of pride and elation that accompanies supporting education. “There is nothing more fulfilling than touching someone’s life,” Welters said as he introduced a film that conveyed how NYU impacts the lives of those who study and work here, and so many others who are part of the Law School community. Sudler and Raisler took the stage at the end of the evening to give the assembled alumni something they hadn’t had in some time—a homework assignment. Their task: to reconnect with an old classmate and tell that graduate about all that is happening at their alma mater. If those personal ties are reestablished, promised Raisler, opportunity, community and leadership will continue to thrive on Washington Square.

As the founder and executive director of Breakthrough, Dutt uses technology and pop culture to promote human rights, particularly among young people, in the U.S. and India. Case-in-point: Breakthrough’s blunt, even confrontational current ad campaign, “What kind of man are you?” informs Indians that married women are becoming infected with HIV by their husbands at alarming rates. Dutt is also the author of With Liberty and Justice for All: Women’s Human Rights in the United States (Center for Women’s Global Leadership, 1994).

López has pioneered the idea of the progressive practice of law. He teaches the Community Economic Development and Community Outreach, Education and Organizing clinics and founded the Center for Community Problem Solving, which in 2005 released a groundbreaking study on the health and welfare of Mexican immigrants. The center aims to help solve the social, economic and legal problems that low-income and immigrant communities face.

Welters began his distinguished career as a staff attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission and eventually rose to become president and CEO of AmeriChoice Corporation, a leading provider of public sector health care in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A trustee of the Law School, Welters and his wife Beatrice created the AnBryce Scholarship, which provides full tuition to J.D. students who are the first in their families to attend graduate school.

This year, BLAPA awarded four new $1,000 clinical law and public interest graduation prizes to students Jennifer Turner ’06, Susan Shin ’06, Cyrus Dugger ’06 and Andre Segura ’06, as well as a $10,000 public interest scholarship to Alexis Hoag ’08.

As Elise Roecker ’07, cochair of Law Women, observed in her introductory remarks, Fox’s impact has been far-reaching. “It is safe to say she has broken open antitrust law,” said Roecker, noting that Fox has advised two presidents, Clinton and Carter (for the latter, she served as commissioner of the National Commission for the Review of Antitrust Laws and Procedures); several countries including South Africa, Indonesia and Russia; and the European Union.

In her speech, Fox emphasized the importance of finding mentors, naming several inspirational female faculty members in the audience, including Sylvia Law ’68 and Linda Silberman. But mentors can be men, too. “I had the good fortune of having a person or two blaze a path for me,” she said, adding that former dean Norman Redlich (LL.M. ’55) had appointed Fox an associate dean in charge of the J.D. division from 1987 to 1990; to date, Fox is the only woman to have held that position.

Breaking barriers has been a way of life for Fox. Among her many posts, she has served as the first female chair of both the New York State Bar Antitrust Law Section and the Section on Antitrust and Economic Regulation of the Association of American Law Schools, and as the first female vice chair of the ABA Antitrust Section.

Fox has made “extraordinary contributions to the legal world,” said Roecker, and it is important “to pay tribute to her humanity in an all-too-often cold profession.” That humanity is something Fox relishes. In addition to her books on antitrust and European Union law, mergers and central European competition policy, she has written a comic novel, W.L., Esquire (Marando Press, 1977), about women in the maledominated legal profession. Fox clears time in her busy schedule to have lunch with her 1Ls, and goes above and beyond to keep her students engaged in the classroom. Every year she recites a poem she wrote about Benjamin Cardozo’s opinion in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. and proximate cause. Said Roecker: “I can tell you my class, at least, applauded.” The assembled guests responded to Fox the same way.

A no-nonsense woman with the lean physique of the former marathon runner she is, a penetrating gaze and a surprisingly quiet and low voice, Berkman, 54, was the main subject of Taking the Heat: The First Women Firefighters of New York City, a documentary narrated by Susan Sarandon that conveys the isolation, harassment and danger these pioneering women endured. The film had its world premiere at Tishman Hall last February, and later aired on PBS.

The facts are that in late 1977, about 500 women signed up for the first NYC firefighter entrance exam that wasn’t restricted to men. Of those who passed the written test, 89 continued to the physical one. All of them, including Berkman, failed. In 1979, Berkman filed a highly publicized, lengthy and contentious lawsuit that challenged the exam’s validity. A federal judge in 1982 upheld Berkman’s claims—that the feats required in the physical exam weren’t essential to fire fighting and discriminated against women—and a new exam and training program were ordered. Later that year, Berkman joined the fire academy’s first class of 47 women trainees.

But the real battle was just beginning. The women were routinely harassed. One particularly dangerous act was to drain the women’s air tanks so that when they were called to a fire they either had to run in without oxygen or be considered cowards. The women were shut out of meals and were subjected to obscenities, verbal abuse, physical violence, sexual molestation and even death threats from other firefighters. “Not all men participated in the harassment,” Berkman says. However, those men who stood up to defend the women became targets themselves.

“There was a lot of opposition to having women in the firehouse,” says Berkman’s attorney, Clinical Professor of Law Laura Sager, who was then the director of the Women’s Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law. “It was a guys’ club.” In many ways, fire fighting still is. “There is still a misogynist climate that goes on in fire departments all over the world because some people still believe that this is a man’s job,” Berkman says.

Indeed, Berkman has earned two promotions by virtue of passing exams. Now as captain of Engine 239 in Brooklyn, she is the first to rush into a burning building. “Any firefighters who say they have never been frightened at an incident are either lying or crazy,” she says.

She has earned a measure of respect and has “a very good relationship” with her allmale engine company, she says, while noting that working with another woman would be a plus. “But I’m so far along in my career. I’m not going to spend my last few years agonizing about whether I’d like to be a lot happier. I’m taking it for what it is, right now.”

Young women firefighters are grateful to Berkman for paving the way. “I don’t think a lot of us would have the courage to do this job if it weren’t for Brenda,” says Regina Wilson, 37, who joined the force in 1999. Berkman’s efforts have not only enabled women to work side by side with men, says Wilson, but have led to even small improvements that loom large in the everyday life of a firefighter, like “having shoes and shirts that fit, female bathrooms in the firehouse and lingo that is gender friendly.”

Even as a child, Berkman challenged the status quo. “One of my earliest memories is of trying to get into the [then-boys-only] Little League,” she says. At school, she wanted to take shop, but was forced to study home economics; she liked math but was discouraged by a teacher. She irked high school authorities by organizing forums for voters to quiz school board candidates. “I thought that kids should have some say in what kinds of things they could pursue,” she says.

Berkman graduated summa cum laude from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, then in 1975 earned her M.A. in history from Indiana University, where she met her now ex-husband, Kenneth Gordon, and moved to New York. She attended the NYU School of Law while working at her father-inlaw’s law firm—whose client roster included the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. It was in part getting to know the fire officers through her job that piqued her interest in joining the FDNY.

Almost 25 years after her victory, however, what rankles her most is how tenuous the hard-fought gains have been. “After 9/11 the buzzword was ‘the brothers,’” says Captain Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. In the six months after 9/11, the FDNY hired just one woman among more than 600 recruits, and today just 29 of the city’s nearly 11,500 firefighters are women. Gorman agrees with Berkman that the city doesn’t do enough to recruit women or minorities. He notes that the city rarely uses women in their promotional efforts.

“I am proud that I challenged and continue to challenge the fire service for the benefit of women and the larger community,” Berkman says. “Being forced to conform to narrow stereotypes of what you can and can’t do with your life, that hurts men as much as women.”

The evening’s keynote speaker was former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker, whom center director and Nusbaum Professor of Law and Business William Allen lauded for “the fortitude and moral leadership” necessary to eliminate double-digit inflation during the ’80s.

“I am Colombian and I wanted to do something about the issue,” says Roa, a Bogotá native. She sued on behalf of Women’s Link Worldwide, a clearinghouse that seeks to help women’s rights advocates around the world develop effective legal strategies. Roa currently serves as the program director of the organization, which has offices in Bogotá and Madrid.

While several bills to liberalize Colombia’s abortion law had failed over the past 30 years, Roa believed she had a good shot of winning when she filed suit in April 2005. The Constitutional Court had recently recognized the legal value of international human rights arguments and used them to solve constitutional challenges in cases related to health, children and women’s participation in politics. “I argued that the Court should be consistent and also recognize the legal status of these international human rights arguments when deciding the issue of abortion,” says Roa.

Before this ruling, an average of 400,000 Colombian women each year risked their health and lives to seek illegal abortions. The government estimated that unsafe abortions were the third leading cause of maternal mortality.

Even more surprising than the legal victory, however, was the impact this highprofile case had on public opinion in this predominantly Catholic and conservative country. In May 2005, one month after Roa filed, 85 percent of Colombians were against abortion in all circumstances. By the time the decision came out, more than 60 percent supported the partial liberalization of abortion. For the first time, Colombians were talking about abortion as a human rights issue, and a matter of gender equality, social justice and public health. “Priests used to be the main sources [for quotes in the media],” says Roa. But now “doctors, feminists, lawyers and human rights activists” are sought for their opinions on abortion.

Roa believes that there will eventually be broader liberalization of abortion in Colombia. “I don’t know how long it will take and what the debate in Congress will be, but I am very clear that the cause is not over and that society is better prepared to face that kind of debate now.”

If anyone understands the challenges—and dangers—of trying to bring about change in a resistant society, it is Roa, who was assigned bodyguards by the government after receiving threats. “Every time I go out and see the light of recognition in someone’s eyes, I think, ‘This person is either going to insult me or thank me.’”

In January, the Supreme Court reached a unanimous decision in favor of Planned Parenthood. It found that a 2003 New Hampshire law, which prevents doctors from performing an abortion on a teenager until 48 hours after a parent has been notified, cannot be upheld because it does not allow an exception for medical emergencies. Instead of striking down the law, however, the justices sent the case back to the lower court in New Hampshire to determine whether the law should be fixed to include the medical emergency exception.

“The case raised other issues [like what legal test must courts use to decide whether to strike down an abortion law that might harm women], but they dodged those by writing a very narrow opinion, and that helped them achieve consensus,” said Dalven. As the New York Times’s legal reporter Linda Greenhouse wrote after the hearing, “Abortion law was not about to undergo a major change in the hands of the new Roberts court, at least not yet.”

Dalven, who worked as a peer educator at a family planning clinic back when she was in high school, has had a long-standing interest in reproductive rights. After law school she clerked for Judge Pierre Leval in the Second Circuit and then in 1997, after just one year at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind & Garrison, she joined the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project.

“One of the advantages of working for a public interest institution is that they let lawyers have such fabulous experiences,” said Dalven. “I’d only been out of law school for 10 years and they had no qualms about letting me argue in front of the Supreme Court. They said, ‘It’s your case, you get to argue it.’”

As grateful as she is for the favorable ruling, Dalven said, “I am concerned that this ruling will embolden legislators to pass unconstitutional laws that are dangerous to women, and force more and more women to go to court with their doctors to protect their rights and get the care they need. Striking down the entire law would have been the right thing and I’m hoping this will still be the outcome.”