In Memorian. Lessons from My Grandmother

• Author: Clara Spera
• Pages: 6-7

Published in Litigation, Volume 47, Number 2, Winter 2021. © 2021 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be

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He thrashed himself, his colleagues, and

his clients not to waste time, to keep ev-

eryone’s eyes on whatever the prize might

be—and there was always a gigantic prize

to be won, though in the early days of our

firm, the prize was just to keep the lights

on; a prize that Steve never lost sight of

even after, through his prodigious talents,

he had assembled enough wealth to buy

multiple power utilities single-handedly.

All of us who learned how to try cases

with him as legal children will never forget

him. All of us who merely listened to his

gravelly bark in firm meetings and mar-

veled at his ability to cut through to the

core of whatever issue might have been

presented will never forget him. All of us

who prospered within the organization he

birthed, like Athena sprung from the brow

of Zeus, will never forget him, and if we’re

just custodians of his memory, neither will

our children or our grandchildren, because

their lives have all been radically altered by

the force of his life.

The system of justice in the United

States has been altered by him too. At

first, it was shaken like an earthquake by

his pioneering of class actions and other

forms of contingent fee entrepreneurship

in commercial litigation. Those upheavals

changed the landscape in lasting ways, in

part because Steve and his fervent students

in our firm brought to the plaintiff’s prac-

tice the resumes, the intellectual rigor, and

the straight-arrow ethics that many giant

defense firms always bragged about. The

rest of it was a tribute to relentless work

ethic and the equally ceaseless desire of

mavericks to prove not just that they be-

longed, but that they were better than the

white-shoe elites, both of which Steve epit-

omized perfectly.

Steve turned the fledgling business he

conceived into an astonishingly successful

enterprise, but even that wasn’t enough for

him. Steve was never “mildly” interested in

anything. If something didn’t inspire his

own passion, it just wasn’t worth bother-

ing with. From music to movies to art, from

jogging to skiing to cycling, lots of interests

fueled the engine in his body and heart, but

the most high-octane fuel was always, in-

comparably, the law, the art and science of

trying lawsuits, and our firm.

He became a student of the slow death

of jury trials and a public health expert

in how to arrest the decline. Through

the Civil Jury Project he founded and fi-

nanced at NYU Law School, he embarked

on a proselytizing mission that enlisted the

aid of many hundreds of judges and thou-

sands of practitioners around the country,

the point of which was to save that critical

feature of our public polity.

It would be a crying shame if his death

sapped the energy of that mission. It needs

to continue, even if no other single person

could likely bring to the mission the re-

markable combination of love for the trial

practice, intellectual brilliance, and street-

smarts that Steve Susman corralled within

himself and kept letting out of the gate like

wild horses.

All of us at Susman Godfrey will miss

Steve Susman intensely. We know him bet-

ter than most. It makes us treasure him all

the more dearly. q

IN MEMORIAM

Lessons from My

Grandmother

CLARA SPERA

The author is an Equal Justice Works Fellow at

the American Civil Liberty Union’s Reproductive

Freedom Project, and the granddaughter of Jus-

tice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

My grandmother, Justice Ruth Bader

Ginsburg, did not attend law school ex-

pecting to become an “impact” litigator.

(The term “impact litigation” may not

have even existed at the time she set off

for law school, in 1956.) She did not start

representing clients in gender equality

cases—or any cases—until a decade after

she graduated from Columbia Law School.

While my grandmother was an undergrad-

uate at Cornell, Professor Robert Cushman,

who had suffered harassment during the

McCarthy period, taught her that the law

could furnish a means to resist oppression.

She did not translate that insight immedi-

ately into a career path. But the work that

she, and others, later did made it possible

for me to envision a career as a litigator,

even well before I started law school.

From a young age, I knew that I wanted

to be involved with issues of justice and

fairness. For a long time, though, I was

convinced that the correct institution to

effect the kinds of changes I wanted to see

was the legislative branch. I dreamed of

one day being a senator or representative,

authoring sweeping legislation that would

correct gross inequalities.

As I came to understand my grand-

mother’s career better, I began to see

another way. As has been noted by com-

mentators and scholars, my grandmoth-

er’s strategy for effecting social change

emerged through a very carefully plotted-

out sequence of cases. As she famously

stated, “real change, enduring change,

happens one step at a time.” But the risk of

back-pedaling remains. Indeed, although

she argued and won landmark gender

equality cases in the 1970s, the fight for

equality and justice for all continues today.

I am a fellowship attorney at the American

Civil Liberties Union, where we strive ev-

ery day to preserve those victories.

One may wonder why she turned to the

courts rather than the legislative branch

to fight for gender equality. I believe there

are two answers. First, a basic structural

reason: at the Supreme Court, she had to

convince only five of nine skeptical men

(even if doing so required her to act as

a “kindergarten teacher”), rather than a

legislative chamber full of them. Second,

litigation allowed her to show off her most

celebrated skill: writing. I have learned in

my short career as a litigator that while

oral advocacy is important to civil litiga-

tion, a case rises and falls on the briefing.

She shone brightest in her writing.