Lisa Richette, An Uncommon Judge
DECEMBER 31, 2007 TAGS:
By Dick Polman
To paraphrase the opening lines of novelist Eric Segal’s Love Story: What can you say about a 79-year-old judge who died?
That she was triumphant. And tragic. That she was a trailblazing American woman who helped shatter professional ceilings by the force of her will. That she was the Gloria Steinem of her city, long before the word feminist entered the language.
That she was a devout Catholic with sincere compassion for women, children, and the homeless. That she wore bikinis well into her 70s. That she loved opera and cooking. That she hated seeing poor people get a raw deal.
That she excelled at her profession, and was laid low by depression. That she threw elbows as well as any man in her field. That she endured family strife and departed this life as one of the most memorable people ever to wear judicial robes in Philadelphia.
When Lisa Richette invested her emotions in an issue, it was like watching a baserunner flatten a catcher with a body block. As Donald Marino, a chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, once told me, “Lisa …cares about her society, the laws, everything that effects life on a daily basis … and she will not be bound by anything that flies in the face of human decency or morality.”
Such was the essence of Lisa Richette, whose hyperbolic tenure on earth at times mimicked the plot twists of a paperback potboiler.
Weeks after her death from lung cancer, she still cuts a swath through the city’s consciousness, as controversial as ever. Folks tell stories about her – about how she spoke her mind and took the heat, about how she’d chauffer the homeless to shelters in her Cadillac Seville, about how she crashed the legal boy’s club way back when most women interested in law were destined to work as secretaries.
And such style! When people think of the late Bella Abzug, another pioneer, they remember her hat. When Philadelphians think of Richette, they remember her flamboyant wardrobe, her flair. In the legal community, one is not supposed to dress like a bohemian, with heavy makeup and red nail polish and earrings hanging to the shoulder blades, all visible even from the back of the courtroom.
That’s how she chose to look, and too bad if somebody didn’t like it.
Her attitude was unapologetic many decades ago, when, as a young assistant district attorney, she showed up in court wearing a pantsuit, and the male judge, deciding her attire represented a shortfall in dignity, held her in contempt. She challenged that ruling before the state Supreme Court, and won. Today, we have a female presidential candidate who campaigns in a pantsuit every day.
Richette went her own defiant way throughout her early years – she married a Jew even though her South Philly Italian father disowned her over it; she graduated from Yale Law School along with only four female classmates; she became a working lawyer at a time when only 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers were women.
Her independence helped gird her for the rough and tumble of Philadelphia politics, an arena that called on all of her strength.
Appointed to the city Court of Common Pleas by Gov. Milton Shapp in 1970 – one of the first women to join the bench - she quickly earned a reputation as a defendant’s judge who insisted on viewing the perpetrators of crime as human beings. Her views had been molded long before, when she worked with emotionally disturbed kids in New Haven and became convinced of a link between bad home life and criminal behavior. She later wrote a pathbreaking book, Throwaway Children, which advocated greater support for the weak of society, that is still taught in some college classes today.
In the early ’70s Frank Rizzo was perhaps America’s most prominent “law and order” mayor. He derided Richette as “Let ’Em Loose Lisa,” the epitome of what he liked to call “limousine liberals.” His attacks fueled her defeat in a 1977 Democratic primary contest for a seat on the state Supreme Court – a bitter loss, because she wanted that job.
But several years later, after overcoming a bout of clinical depression – her second marriage to Lawrence Richette had broken up, her first marriage having ended decades earlier – she threw herself into a new extracurricular activity, helping Philadelphia’s homeless.
Tongues wagged over that one. Judges, they said, were supposed to stay on the bench and stick to their cases. But she shrugged off the barbs and gave half of her Christmas gift budget to the people she met on the street – “Ruth” and “Florence” and “Mimi,” and the guy on Seventh Street who knew about music, and the woman at the train station with the British accent. She talked about them all.
I met Richette during this phase of her life. She had recently been re-elected to a 10-year term on the city bench. She sat in her townhouse wearing a blood-red robe, tracing elaborate figure-eights with her cigarette as she spoke. She dismissed her critics with the flick of an ash, and said:
“It’d be perfectly acceptable for me to go sit in the Union League” – home base for the city establishment – “and talk about anything under the sun with powerful people. Nobody would be concerned about that.
“But I choose to do something else. I’m a human being first. (On the bench) you get so rutted. You tend to become a problem-solver in a very restrictive way, very cognitive and very rational. Doing this repetitively can affect you. You need to feel useful to human beings in a very different way. You shouldn’t always need to feel that you’re sanctioning people.
“In court, you have the last word. In life, that’s not always true. There are very few last words.”
Yet it’s somehow ironic that this self-avowed compassionate judge was herself repeatedly victimized by crime. She was once beaten and robbed in front a newsstand, in full view of onlookers. Another time, she was punched in the head while sitting in her car; seemingly unperturbed, she later said, “I went to the detectives, then I went shopping.”
And this past summer, shortly before she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, she was attacked in her home by her 48-year-old son, Larry, with whom she had a difficult relationship, and she had to be stitched up at a hospital. Larry’s preliminary hearing in the matter was set for Monday, Oct. 29. It did not take place. His mother had died on Friday.
But these little melodramas can’t obscure her achievements. Today, 50 percent of American law students are women, and they owe a debt of gratitude to the pioneers who showed them a way up. Lisa Richette lived as she chose, conventions be damned. With final apologies to Eric Segal, her credo can be summarized thusly:
Life is never having to say you’re sorry.
Dick Polman is national political columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Photographs reprinted with the permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer .
To paraphrase the opening lines of novelist Eric Segal’s Love Story: What can you say about a 79-year-old judge who died?
That she was triumphant. And tragic. That she was a trailblazing American woman who helped shatter professional ceilings by the force of her will. That she was the Gloria Steinem of her city, long before the word feminist entered the language.
That she was a devout Catholic with sincere compassion for women, children, and the homeless. That she wore bikinis well into her 70s. That she loved opera and cooking. That she hated seeing poor people get a raw deal.
That she excelled at her profession, and was laid low by depression. That she threw elbows as well as any man in her field. That she endured family strife and departed this life as one of the most memorable people ever to wear judicial robes in Philadelphia.
When Lisa Richette invested her emotions in an issue, it was like watching a baserunner flatten a catcher with a body block. As Donald Marino, a chancellor of the Philadelphia Bar Association, once told me, “Lisa …cares about her society, the laws, everything that effects life on a daily basis … and she will not be bound by anything that flies in the face of human decency or morality.”
Such was the essence of Lisa Richette, whose hyperbolic tenure on earth at times mimicked the plot twists of a paperback potboiler.
Weeks after her death from lung cancer, she still cuts a swath through the city’s consciousness, as controversial as ever. Folks tell stories about her – about how she spoke her mind and took the heat, about how she’d chauffer the homeless to shelters in her Cadillac Seville, about how she crashed the legal boy’s club way back when most women interested in law were destined to work as secretaries.
And such style! When people think of the late Bella Abzug, another pioneer, they remember her hat. When Philadelphians think of Richette, they remember her flamboyant wardrobe, her flair. In the legal community, one is not supposed to dress like a bohemian, with heavy makeup and red nail polish and earrings hanging to the shoulder blades, all visible even from the back of the courtroom. That’s how she chose to look, and too bad if somebody didn’t like it.
Her attitude was unapologetic many decades ago, when, as a young assistant district attorney, she showed up in court wearing a pantsuit, and the male judge, deciding her attire represented a shortfall in dignity, held her in contempt. She challenged that ruling before the state Supreme Court, and won. Today, we have a female presidential candidate who campaigns in a pantsuit every day.
Richette went her own defiant way throughout her early years – she married a Jew even though her South Philly Italian father disowned her over it; she graduated from Yale Law School along with only four female classmates; she became a working lawyer at a time when only 3 percent of the nation’s lawyers were women.
Her independence helped gird her for the rough and tumble of Philadelphia politics, an arena that called on all of her strength.
Appointed to the city Court of Common Pleas by Gov. Milton Shapp in 1970 – one of the first women to join the bench - she quickly earned a reputation as a defendant’s judge who insisted on viewing the perpetrators of crime as human beings. Her views had been molded long before, when she worked with emotionally disturbed kids in New Haven and became convinced of a link between bad home life and criminal behavior. She later wrote a pathbreaking book, Throwaway Children, which advocated greater support for the weak of society, that is still taught in some college classes today.
In the early ’70s Frank Rizzo was perhaps America’s most prominent “law and order” mayor. He derided Richette as “Let ’Em Loose Lisa,” the epitome of what he liked to call “limousine liberals.” His attacks fueled her defeat in a 1977 Democratic primary contest for a seat on the state Supreme Court – a bitter loss, because she wanted that job.
But several years later, after overcoming a bout of clinical depression – her second marriage to Lawrence Richette had broken up, her first marriage having ended decades earlier – she threw herself into a new extracurricular activity, helping Philadelphia’s homeless.
Tongues wagged over that one. Judges, they said, were supposed to stay on the bench and stick to their cases. But she shrugged off the barbs and gave half of her Christmas gift budget to the people she met on the street – “Ruth” and “Florence” and “Mimi,” and the guy on Seventh Street who knew about music, and the woman at the train station with the British accent. She talked about them all.I met Richette during this phase of her life. She had recently been re-elected to a 10-year term on the city bench. She sat in her townhouse wearing a blood-red robe, tracing elaborate figure-eights with her cigarette as she spoke. She dismissed her critics with the flick of an ash, and said:
“It’d be perfectly acceptable for me to go sit in the Union League” – home base for the city establishment – “and talk about anything under the sun with powerful people. Nobody would be concerned about that.
“But I choose to do something else. I’m a human being first. (On the bench) you get so rutted. You tend to become a problem-solver in a very restrictive way, very cognitive and very rational. Doing this repetitively can affect you. You need to feel useful to human beings in a very different way. You shouldn’t always need to feel that you’re sanctioning people.
“In court, you have the last word. In life, that’s not always true. There are very few last words.”
Yet it’s somehow ironic that this self-avowed compassionate judge was herself repeatedly victimized by crime. She was once beaten and robbed in front a newsstand, in full view of onlookers. Another time, she was punched in the head while sitting in her car; seemingly unperturbed, she later said, “I went to the detectives, then I went shopping.”
And this past summer, shortly before she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, she was attacked in her home by her 48-year-old son, Larry, with whom she had a difficult relationship, and she had to be stitched up at a hospital. Larry’s preliminary hearing in the matter was set for Monday, Oct. 29. It did not take place. His mother had died on Friday.
But these little melodramas can’t obscure her achievements. Today, 50 percent of American law students are women, and they owe a debt of gratitude to the pioneers who showed them a way up. Lisa Richette lived as she chose, conventions be damned. With final apologies to Eric Segal, her credo can be summarized thusly:
Life is never having to say you’re sorry.
Dick Polman is national political columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Photographs reprinted with the permission of the Philadelphia Inquirer .
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COMMENTS (3) TO ADD A COMMENT, PLEASE FIRST SIGN IN OR REGISTER.
Larry Richette wrote on March 3, 2008 2:02pm
'Thanks to Dick Polman for capturing my mother's essence, even though he repeated the false story that I "assaulted" her. His piece made me cry as none of the other comments and obituaries about Lisa Richette have done.' [Report Comment]
Dan Cirucci wrote on January 4, 2008 5:09pm
'This story (I dare not call it an obit) on the life and death of Judge Lisa Richette captures the essence of this great citizen and jurist. It is a masterpiece -- so human, so real, so complete, so compelling, just like the great lady herself. As William Brennan so correctly stated, Judge Richette really was "one of the last Philadelphia legends." She was the definition of the word "inimitable." In an increasingly passionless world Lisa Richette refused to let go of her passions and she never lost her ability to care or her capacity for outrage. Over a period of 28 years as Communications Director for the Bar Association I encountered her many times and each time I was inspired by her and I always learned something from her -- sometimes just by observing her. Of course I loved the fact that she was such a proud Italian-American. Early success did not change her in the way it changes so many others. She knew who she was and she was proud enough and secure enough to always be who she was. Thousands of ordinary people recognized Lisa Richette instantly and were drawn to her. She was one of those few Philadelphians who could be identified simply by her first name. And always, she remained as she was: Lisa. Her passing marks another step in the death of authenticity and the slow, disheartening triumph of artificiality. But just for this moment, you've brought Lisa back to life. You've captured her perfectly. Bravo! Dan Cirucci Visit my blog: www.dancirucci.blogspot.com ' [Report Comment]
Gina Furia Rubel, Esq. wrote on January 4, 2008 3:42am
'How perfect. How true. Judge Richette who was a trailblazer for women, attorneys, jurists, Italian-Americans, Philadelphia Justinians, children and the homeless! She was truly one of the most brilliant and yet extremely flamboyant women I've had the pleasure to know. She embraced life and law. I remember a particular homicide case more that a decade ago when I worked for the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas. Jude Conroy was the Philadelphia prosecutor. The case was against a couple who left their disabled young child in a crib inside their house - only heated by kerosene - to go out and sell crack and induldge themselves. The house caught on fire and by the time the child was rescued, he was burned over a large percentage of his body. The child lived for months (perhaps seven if my memory is right) in severe pain and then died. It was a bench trial (no jury) and the judge found the couple guilty of homicide. I remember crying in the back of the room for the child and knowing that the judge did the right thing. She came down so hard on those parents - her words stung deep - but she was right - she was brilliant - she was passionate - and she followed the letter of the law. Judge Richette was the first woman judge in Philadelphia and an active member of The Justinian Society. As stated so nicely by Rudolph Garcia, Chancellor of The Justinian Society: "Judge Richette epitomized the ideals of The Justinian Society and was an inspiration to all of us. In 1994, we selected her as the first recipient of the Beccaria Award. Since then, the award has been presented annually by the Justinian Society and the Criminal Justice Section of the Philadelphia Bar Association to a legal jurist, scholar or practitioner for outstanding contributions to the cause of justice and the advancement of legal education. Judge Richette also was the first recipient of The Justinian Society?s Outstanding Women in the Law Award, in June 2000." Thank you for remembering Judge Richette. She truly deserves the accolades. - Gina Furia Rubel, Esq. Author: Everyday Public Relations for Lawyers www.furiarubel.com / Blog: www.theprlawyer.com ' [Report Comment]
