Stanley G. Feldman: what one lawyer can do.

• Author: Todd, James S.
• Position: Arizona Supreme Court Justice

Stanley Feldman makes it sound like he stumbled into law school by accident, having failed in achieving his earlier goal of becoming a professional basketball player and also having lost interest in becoming a history professor. What attracted him to law, he said in a recent interview, was "'[from the first day, I loved it--I just loved the whole process, the reasoning, the cases. Just interesting, fascinating. I found it more intellectually stimulating than anything I'd ever done.'" (1) He studied law at the University of Arizona in his adopted hometown of Tucson, (2) where his affinity for the law paid off handsomely in his grades; he graduated first in his class. It did not pay off in opportunities, however--he could not even get an interview. "'The market for Jewish lawyers, Hispanic lawyers, women lawyers ... or any minority of any kind'" he says "'was, shall we say, extremely limited.'" (3) Like any other young lawyer without opportunities, he made his own, opening an office in a converted warehouse. Since he is a modest individual, he likes to say that he met success because he was smart enough to open his office across the street from two other young lawyers who were to meet great success themselves, Morris and Stewart Udall. (4) Obviously there is more to it than that. But the Udall brothers did take an interest in him, and he was, in turn, influenced by them and their approach to practicing law. He took all kinds of clients and all kinds of cases. "'If you had five dollars, you could be a client. If you didn't have five dollars, then I had time,'" he has said. (5)

It did not take him long to become a successful attorney. By 1968, twelve years after his graduation from law school, he had become a partner in his own law firm, Miller, Pitt & Feldman, and he was president of the Pima County Bar Association. He also began to teach courses at his law school alma mater. In 1974 he became president of the State Bar of Arizona. In 1982, his name was one of those sent to Governor Bruce Babbitt, (6) under Arizona's then-new merit selection system, for a vacancy on the Arizona Supreme Court. Babbitt chose him, and thus began a twenty-year period of service that was to catapult him into the first ranks of the nation's state high court judges. (7)

Now that Stanley Feldman has stepped down from the bench much is being made of his career, as it should be, in terms of its importance for the state of Arizona, its people, and its court systems. His is a wonderful American story that illustrates how one individual, by virtue of hard work and dedication to principle, can make a huge difference. It also illustrates the unique opportunity that a career in law can provide, and it shows that it is not necessary to go to one of the top ten law schools, to clerk for a judge after graduation, or to become a federal judge in order to meet great success. That is a message that needs to be communicated to the great majority of the nation's law students who will not have those opportunities. Stanley Feldman is an inspiration, an Atticus Finch who transcended his small town beginnings and rose to the pinnacle of his profession without ever leaving his home state or in any way sacrificing his principles.

At the recent annual event of the Tucson Human Relations Committee, the Stanley G. Feldman Civil Rights Award was announced, and it was presented, not coincidentally, for the first time to Stanley G. Feldman for his...