'Queen' Sybil Moses is Retiring from N.J. Bench
It wasn’t until she was 30-something and married with two children that Sybil Moses went to law school.
And that was in the 1970s, when she and the other members of the “Band of Mothers” at Rutgers University School of Law in Newark, New Jersey, were “a bit of an oddity at the male-dominated school,” reports the Star-Ledger.
After graduation, she worked initially for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, trying 45 cases. Then she became an administrative law judge and, in 1987, a superior court judge in Hackensack, one of the state’s busiest courts. Eleven years ago, she made history by becoming the state’s first female assignment judge.
Now 69, Moses is retiring eight months before she turns 70—the mandatory retirement age—because she has been ill, according to the newspaper.
During her 21 years on the bench there, “one of her proudest accomplishments at the Hackensack courthouse was creating a free day care center, the first of its kind in the courts,” the Star-Ledger writes. “The first-floor suite is filled with colorful toys and games, its walls stenciled with animals and hearts. Anyone can drop their child there to attend to a court matter.”
She has also blazed a path for other women in leadership roles—there are now women at the helm of six of the state’s 15 court viscinages, the newspaper reports.
As the first, Moses found that a sense of humor helped leaven her no-nonsense management style:
At the end of her lunch with the other judges each week, the Star-Ledger recounts, she would stand up and sign off the same way: “Just don’t forget who is the queen here.
“It was a joke,” she says, “but someone had to be in charge, and it was me.”
In her leadership role, she also tried to treat everyone equally, and with respect. And, the newspaper says, she answered every letter that she received.
