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Jeannette G. Brill ’08 (1889–1964)
Brill graduated from Brooklyn Law School in 1908 while teaching at the Manhattan Preparatory School and was admitted to the bar in 1910. Her fellow teachers raised the funds for her tuition at Brooklyn Law School, and she often studied until two in the morning after finishing her classes. She became Brooklyn’s first woman magistrate and the second woman magistrate in New York City. In 1923, she was appointed Deputy Attorney General, the first woman to serve on the state attorney general’s staff, where she oversaw labor and compensation cases. Early in her career, she was one of the first women to act as defense counsel in a first-degree murder case, defending a woman who avoided the electric chair and was instead convicted of manslaughter. Appointed to the Brooklyn Magistrate’s Court in 1929, she served through 1941 and became a leading advocate for women on the bench, insisting to the New York Times that women were “particularly able to deal with cases involving women, children, and family affairs.” Reflecting on her early years in the profession, she recalled that “male judges and lawyers of those days were sometimes very unkind to us” and that women “had to get pretty rough at times” to be taken seriously. After leaving the bench, she continued to practice law and remained active in civic and welfare work.