When Fern A. Fisher ’78 had to list every place she had ever lived on her New York bar application, she filled two pages. She had moved frequently, as her mother, a domestic violence survivor, was pushed by poverty and evictions to move the family to new homes. On the day Fisher graduated from Harvard Law School, she learned that her mother had just lost her latest home to foreclosure. Fisher’s mother could not understand, therefore, why her daughter turned down the financial security offered by private law firms to take what was then the highly unusual path of pursuing a career in public interest.

Judge Rya Zobel ’56 of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts was among 23 women appointed in 1979 to the federal judiciary, more than double the number of women appointed as federal judges in the previous 190 years. In a group of pioneering women lawyers, her journey to the federal bench was perhaps the most remarkable.