Maria Marcus, a law professor who defended civil rights in the South as a public interest attorney and successfully defended six cases before the United States Supreme Court of New York State, in one case winning unemployment benefits for striking workers , died with her on April 27. house in Manhattan. She was 88.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Valerie Marcus.
Professor Marcus pleads the cases before the Supreme Court as the New York Attorney General’s representative. She was assistant attorney general from 1967 to 1978 and chief of the trial office of the office from 1976 to 1978.
In early 1979, the court ruled, 6-to-3, in New York Telephone v. New York State Department of Labor, that the state had jurisdiction to require companies to pay unemployment benefits to striking workers. (Professor Marcus argued the case in 1978.)
The judges rejected the telephone company’s argument that because the law implicitly favored labor over management, it had to yield to federal labor laws that argued for government neutrality. In its ruling, the court upheld the decision of an appeals court that even though the law put the state on the side of labor during a strike, Congress had not imposed a uniform national policy on unemployment benefits for strikers, and it was up to the states. left to decide.
According to the Supreme Court Historical Society, of the 160 women who have argued in court since 1880, only eight more appeared than Professor Marcus. From 1880 to 1980, she ranked ninth with five attorneys, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for most of a woman’s arguments in court.
She taught at Fordham University School of Law from 1978 until her retirement in 2011. She was only the second woman to become a tenured member there.
Professor Marcus moderated Fordham’s award-winning moot court program for 42 years. In 1995, a team of hers won the National Moot Court Competition, sponsored by the New York City Bar Association and the American College of Trial Lawyers.
She was credited with writing one of the first law review articles on domestic violence, “Conjugal Violence: The Law of Force and the Force of Law,” in 1981.
Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who served as a co-counselor in the Supreme Court unemployment benefits case, described Professor Marcus in a telephone interview as a “rigorous trial attorney who was a perfectionist but a tremendously patient mentor.”
Matthew Diller, the dean of Fordham’s law school, wrote in an email that her “principal legacy lies in the generations of students she taught – emphasizing the values of integrity, clarity and precision and a sense of joy in the intellectual beyond. and again from reasoned argument that legal advocacy is at its best.”
Maria Eleanor Erica Lenhoff was born on June 23, 1933 in Vienna. Her father, Arthur Lenhoff, was a judge on the Austrian Constitutional Court, the country’s highest tribunal. Her mother, Clara (Gruber) Lenhoff, was a homemaker.
On the day Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, the family fled first to Switzerland, then to England and finally to the United States. Her father, a Jew, was on the Gestapo’s wanted list for his legal rulings demanding religious equality in colleges — decisions Professor Marcus later compared to US civil rights justice in an article like “Austria’s Pre-War Brown v. Board.” or Education.”
“Based on this experience, she had a deep sense of the importance of justice and the rule of law,” said William M. Treanor, the dean and executive vice president of the Georgetown University Law Center. “I learned a lot from her work, which combined extraordinary erudition with a dedication to law as a force for good.”
Professor Marcus received a bachelor’s degree in English from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1954 and graduated from Yale Law School in 1957. There she met and married Norman Marcus, who became a general counsel to the New York City Planning Commission. He died in 2008.
In addition to her daughter Valerie, who is vice president of legal affairs at RCA Records, she leaves behind two other children, Nicole and Eric Marcus, and six grandchildren.
Professor Marcus served as associate counsel for the National Office of the NAACP from 1961 to 1967, litigating in major civil rights cases in the South. She worked with Robert L. Carter, the general counsel, and Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader in Mississippi.
She was vice president of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York from 1995 to 1996, and in 1973 headed an association committee that recommended that the city council pass legislation to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.
Professor Marcus, colleagues said, had an uncanny knack for remembering her students’ names and faces on the first day of class. After retiring, she continued to moderate Fordham Law’s Moot Court Board for another ten years.
Professor James Kainen recalled in a Fordham obituary that her performance would provoke frequent lamentation from Reverend Joseph A. O’Hare, Fordham’s former president.
“Every year during his tenure,” said Professor Kainen, “President O’Hare would come to one of our faculty meetings and never regret his inability to hire a football coach who would set a record approaching that of Maria’s advocacy teams. †
