June 2000

Proud to Be a Lawyer: A Family History

By Linda A. Marousek, Guest Editor

I am a fourth generation lawyer. I used to say, joking, that it was a genetic defect. I don't say that anymore. After 20 years as a lawyer, when I look at my family history, I have begun to understand what has drawn us all to the law.

My maternal great-great-grandfather read for the bar in Dakota Territory, before there was a law school, or even a state, on the Great Plains. He was a probate judge. Other than those facts, I don't know much about his legal career. He inspired his son to want to be a lawyer, and he died young. The son (my great-grandfather) never got the opportunity to fulfill his dream of becoming a lawyer. So when his own daughter (my grandmother) married a fleet-footed young track star from another town, my great-grandfather encouraged the young man to go to law school.

By the time I knew my grandfather, he had a bald head with a thick fringe of white hair around the edges. He had only one arm; he had lost the other in a hunting accident. He loved his hunting dogs, and he swore in a way I had never heard in my Baptist home.

Grandpa was fair, and he was a fighter. He told me, "The law's a good profession for a girl." He told me that when he was practicing law, he had defended "drunks and Indians," South Dakota's two most oppressed groups. Grandpa ran afoul of the state bar hierarchy a couple of times in his legal career, but even people who didn't like him then, now think that he was in the right. I met his contemporaries later, as my teachers when I was in law school. They told me again, "He was a fighter." At his funeral, a young Baptist minister wasted a fine Christian sermon on my grandpa, the atheist. But Grandpa's oldest living friend gave the best eulogy Grandpa could have had: "If it wasn't for Jake, a lot of poor people in Clay County would have had no justice at all."

When Grandpa said law was a good profession for a girl, my mother listened. She went to law school in South Dakota in the early 1950s. She was the only woman who graduated with her law school class. She practiced law with Grandpa for a while, and then took 18 years off to raise kids. She went back to practicing law 25 years ago. The year that she went back to the law, she was one of only five women who were members of the South Dakota bar.

Like Grandpa, Mom is a fighter. A few years ago, she took on the biggest bank in the state and their impressive lawyer (a former state bar president) in representing a hospital janitor stuck in a bad real estate deal. She won. More importantly, the janitor won.

My mom practiced law until she was 70 years old. Most of her practice was municipal law. In a small South Dakota town, that means doing legal research on everything from weed nuisances to hospital bonds. It also means occasionally requesting that the City Council convene in executive session, telling the Council members that they are behaving like children and that they should remember their legal responsibilities, and then having them behave like she asked them to.

Like my mother, I listened to my grandfather say that law was a good profession for a girl. I went to law school in the same building where Grandpa and Mom studied. People in the building remembered them both, and Grandpa's vacant law office, with his name still on the window, was downtown. From the way that people responded to the family name, I knew that I was following heroes.

Those heroes were small-town lawyers in private practice for most of their legal careers. I have spent most of the last 20 years in the administrative hearing system, as a state employee. I make quasi-judicial decisions about child support owed by people who are too poor to go to court with a member of the private bar representing them. I make life-and-death decisions about whether a person gets welfare benefits next month. The work is emotionally challenging and legally complex. The obvious professional successes are few and far between, but every now and then someone tells me what impact my work has had. I will always treasure the letter from the public assistance client who wrote, "It seems to me that justice is all too rare for the poor and the powerless. You have restored my faith in legal justice, at least in the state of Washington." Sometimes I reread that letter, and then I go on with my work.

After 20 years as a lawyer, I never say anymore that being a lawyer is a genetic defect. It was a bad joke, anyway. Now, I say that the blood of heroes runs in my veins. It's not a joke. It's the truth.

Linda A. Marousek is a Review Judge with the Department of Social and Health Services Board of Appeals.

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