Judge Shapiro in her chambers

For many a law student, getting onto the Law Review is akin to finding the Holy Grail. Imagine then, if you can, what it must be like to have an entire issue of the Law Review devoted to tributes to you. That is what happened to Judge Shapiro, United States District Court Senior Judge.

The November 2003 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review was dedicated to Judge Shapiro to mark the occasion of her twenty-fifth year on the federal bench. The opening tribute was by Sandra Day O'Connor, then Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. It becomes clear from reading the tributes that Judge Shapiro is notable not only for being a great judge but also for being a great human being.

Former Justice O'Connor exhibits a very human touch herself when she praises Judge Shapiro for her willingness to give her time and talents as a mentor, and describes an occasion on which even she got some mentoring from Judge Shapiro. O'Connor had recently been appointed the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court when she attended an event in Philadelphia, in the early 1980's. As a "first," O'Connor writes, she was short on mentors, but Judge Shapiro, with a history of "firsts" of her own, knew what it was like to be the only woman in the room. O'Connor welcomed and appreciated the words of support and encouragement from Judge Shapiro that the Judge knew would be important for O'Connor to hear.

Judge Shapiro's own string of firsts includes the following: first woman to serve as a law clerk on the Pennsylvania Supremem Court (for Chief Justice Horace Stern, a notable figure in legal history); first woman partner at the prominent law firm of Dechert, Price & Rhoads (now Dechert LLP); first woman to serve on and then chair the Board of Governors of the Philadelphia Bar Association; first woman to be appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (which includes Philadelphia), and, as such, the first woman to sit on the federal bench in all of the Third Circuit.

A native and loyal Philadelphian, Judge Shapiro was inducted in 1981 into the Hall of Fame of Cheltenham High School, located in Elkins Park, a residential suburb northwest of the city, where she was a member of the Class of 1945. She received a B.A. degree with honors in political theory from the University of Michigan in 1948, and then went to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was one of only eight women in her first-year law class.

Norma, as it was then appropriate to call her, was a top student and an editor of the Law Review at Penn and received her J.D. degree Magna Cum Laude in 1951. After her clerkship for Justice Stern, she taught Law and Psychiatry at the University of Pennslvania Law School and then went to work for the Dechert law firm.

Some of the Judge's mementos and awards;
behind photos is a Chihuly bowl from the ABA

In what might seem a startling departure for a woman who was to achieve such distinction, Norma (still not Judge Shapiro at the time) suspended her formal legal career for nine years to raise her three young sons. Even during that period, however, "stay-at-home" would hardly have been an apt description of someone as active in community affairs as she was, including service as a member and president of the school board in Lower Merion, another Philadelphia suburb. She also spent at least one evening a week at the library keeping up on legal developments. Soon after returning to the work force and the Dechert law firm, Norma became a partner in the firm, in 1973 and remained there until 1978, when President Jimmy Carter appointed her to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Of this appointment, her friend and colleague on the bench, Judge Anita B. Brody, writes in her Law Review tribute that those who were close to the Judge knew that she would find dumped in her lap hundreds of cases known by members of the judiciary as "dogs." These are cases that are very old, or in which the lawyers do not get along, or in which the trial is expected to last at least a month. Subsequently, Judge Shapiro would see to it that this tradition of shifting such cases to a newly appointed judge was changed. At the time, however, she had to deal with a crushing caseload of this sort, along with the burdens of being a "first woman," with lawyers sometimes suggesting in their behavior a certain lack of respect.

As far as her colleagues on the bench were concerned, Judge Shapiro simply won them over with warmth, generosity and gusto. Judge Brody writes that for the birthday of every colleague, Judge Shapiro purchases an elaborate birthday cake large enough for the entire bench at the judges' lunch, composes a suitable ditty set to a popular tune, and sings it herself, off-key. It is certainly not the case, however, that the Judge is tender rather than tough on the bench. Judge Brody also writes of a boxing promoter known for his eagerness to talk about upcoming fights who was being interviewed on TV. The promoter was under a gag order imposed by Judge Shapiro in a boxing case, and told the interviewer that he could not say one word about the upcoming fights, adding, "What Judge Norma wants, Judge Norma gets."

Presumably, what Judge Norma wants, Judge Norma gets because of the respect in which she is held. The late Edward R. Becker, a former Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, wrote in his Law Review tribute that he could say with total confidence that Norma Shapiro was one of the very best judges in the federal system.

This is not to say that Judge Shapiro's rulings have never engendered heated controversy. Her colleague Judge Louis H. Pollak, currently Senior Judge for the United States District Court, writes in the Law Review of one of the cases for which Judge Shapiro may be best known, and regarding which a public official went so far as to impugn the Judge's motives. A judge might be cowed, Judge Pollak writes, by malign criticism of this sort, but not Judge Shapiro, who is made of sterner stuff and would never give in to "sideline yahoos."

The case was Harris v. City of Philadelphia, which began in 1982 as a class action filed by inmates of Holmesburg Prison complaining that flagrant overcrowding had created conditions so debilitating and degrading as to violate their Constitutional rights. The City entered into two consent degrees in the case, and the second, in 1991, required Judge Shapiro to supervise extensively over a period of years the City's compliance with the decree. In her opinion in 2000 closing the case, the Judge noted that the 1991 decree anticipated both long-term and short-term relief, the latter including expanded capacity and early release of eligible pretrial detainees. The opinion goes on to describe new facilities built and programs initiated by the city, including one program involving community-based substance-abuse treatment and support services for paroled inmates. Inmates enrolled in that program had a lower recidivism rate than inmates not in the program. "This," the opinion concludes, "was a true success story."

Judge Shapiro, however, is, in Judge Pollak's words, made of "sterner stuff" than to be cowed by such criticism. In an interview published in the September 1996 issue of The Third Branch: The Newsletter of the Federal Courts, Judge Shapiro stressed the importance of making it clear that judges do not oppose informed criticism of their decisions, and said that the occasionally improper conduct of judges is a proper area of concern. She decried, however, improper personal attacks on judges, and said that her particular goal, as then chair-elect of the American Bar Association's Judicial Division, was "to show special concern for the independence of the Judiciary, to determine what judges can do to understand their proper role, and to protect and defend that role."

Judge Shapiro in Maine in 2006 before jointly
conducting wedding ceremony for law clerks

Perhaps what best demonstrates the balance that Judge Shapiro achieves in her professional life between the necessarily tough public persona and the tender private person is the relationship the Judge has with her law clerks. Her relationship with them is life long, and for her twenty-fifth anniversary on the bench, they arranged for the painting of the portrait of her that is displayed in her courtroom.

An illustration of the distance Judge Shapiro will travel for the sake of her law clerks, despite being obliged in recent years to use a motorized scooter for mobility, was a trip to Maine in the summer of 2006 to perform a wedding ceremony jointly with her colleague Judge Brody, when one of Judge Shapiro's former law clerks married one of Judge Brody's former law clerks.

On a table in the Judge's chambers a bowl by the renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly represents the American Bar Association's 2006 John Marshall Award for Judge Shapiro's lifelong dedication to the improvement of the administration of justice. The Judge also received in 2003 the prestigious Meador-Rosenberg Award of the ABA's Standing Committee on Federal Judicial Improvement, and in 1999 the Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievment Award given by the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession. She was the Honoree of the Year of the National Association of Women Judges in 1993, and received that group's Excellence in Service Award in 2003. In 1993 she was the first recipient of the Philadelphia Bar Association's Sandra Day O'Connor Award, and in 1991 she received the Federal Bar Association Bill of Rights Award.

This partial list of the honors conferred on Judge Shapiro does not, of course, conclude her story. On Senior Judge status and getting around these days in her motorized scooter, Judge Norma L. Shapiro is still going strong.