Trailblazing Lawyer, 91, Feels Pain of Her Pro Bono Foreclosure Clients
At the age of 91, New York’s former solicitor general is going back to her legal roots to volunteer on behalf of clients facing foreclosure.
Shirley Adelson Siegel was the only woman in her class at Yale Law School, and she still stands out, the New York Times reports. “At a minimum, Ms. Siegel is an inspiration of the Lance Armstrong variety, a dazzling model of exceptionalism,” the newspaper says. “She can still pluck dates, titles and the names of obscure committees from her memory as if she had an internal fail-safe Google function.”
The Times trailed Siegel as she assured a client before a court settlement conference that she had seen rough times in the Depression and survived, and her client, Ileta Green, could do the same. Siegel was only 13 when her family was kicked out of their home.
After graduating from Yale, Siegel did committee work in public housing and civil rights, the story says. Next she headed the civil rights bureau of the New York State Law Department and then became the state’s solicitor general. But for much of the last 20 years, she concentrated on teaching and travel rather than law practice. That changed in 2008, when Siegel volunteered in a foreclosure project at the City Bar Justice Center.
“My interest was always to work to help people get decent housing they could afford,” Siegel told the Times. “That’s what inspired the New Deal programs for public housing. And I guess I never got over it, that’s all.”
