Eleanor Virden Jackson Piel (September 22, 1920 – November 26, 2022) was an American civil rights lawyer. She entered civil rights law after United States v. Masaaki Kuwabara, a case where interned Japanese Americans were tried for declining to be drafted. She practiced law until she was in her early 90s.

Education

Jackson Piel attended the University of California, Los Angeles and then transferred to University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a BA in 1940. She applied to the Berkeley law school, but was denied admission. She was told by the interviewing dean that “females always had nervous breakdowns.” She attended the University of Southern California school of law for one year and then transferred to Berkeley where she graduated from in 1943. She was the only woman in the graduating class, and in 1970 she talked with the ''New York Times'' about the barriers women lawyers faced.

Career

Jackson Piel clerked for Judge Louis E. Goodman of the Federal District Court in San Francisco. In 1964, she represented

Sandra Adickes Sandra L. Adickes is American civil rights activist, both during the Vietnam War and with the New York City teachers' union. She is known for her role in the Mississippi Freedom School of 1964, and as the plaintiff in ''Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co ...

in the case of Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. In 1999, she worked for ten years to free a man from Buffalo after DNA testing showed that he was innocent.

Awards and honors

In 2013, she was awarded the Norman Redlich Capital Defense Distinguished Service Award from the Committee on Capital Punishment of the New York City Bar Association.

Personal life and death

In 1955, she married Gerard Piel. Together they had a daughter. Jackson Piel was born in Santa Monica, California. She died on November 26, 2022, at the age of 102.

References

1920 births 2022 deaths 20th-century American women lawyers 20th-century American lawyers American centenarians People from Santa Monica, California UC Berkeley School of Law alumni Women centenarians {{US-law-bio-stub