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 The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school the ...

and then transferred to

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, 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 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 The Association of the Bar of the City of New York, commonly referred to as the New York City Bar Association (City Bar), founded in 1870, is a voluntary association of lawyers and law students. Since 1896, the organization has been headquartere ...

Personal life and death

In 1955, she married

Gerard Piel Gerard Piel (1 March 1915 in Woodmere, N.Y. – 5 September 2004) was the publisher of the new ''Scientific American'' magazine starting in 1948. He wrote for magazines, including ''The Nation'', and published books on science for the genera ...

. Together they had a daughter. Jackson Piel was born in

Santa Monica, California Santa Monica (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Santa Mónica'') is a city in Los Angeles County, California, Los Angeles County, situated along Santa Monica Bay on California's South Coast (California), South Coast. Santa Monica's 2020 United Sta ...

. 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 women centenarians Lawyers from Santa Monica, California UC Berkeley School of Law alumni {{US-law-bio-stub