Eleanor Jackson Piel
Member of The Fortune Society Board of Directors

(Excerpted from One Tough Case, By Bonnie Azab Powell.  To read the full biography, please click here.)

In a unique career spanning six-plus decades, Eleanor Jackson Piel ’43 has been a scrappy defender of the disenfranchised.

To hear Eleanor Jackson Piel tell it, she didn’t set out to be a pioneer. She was just ambitious and stubborn. Women weren’t supposed to go to law school, so she did.

Big firms didn’t want her, so she worked for herself. “With no one to monitor me and tell me I couldn’t, I’ve taken all kinds of cases and issues,” she says. “I’ve done it all! And it’s been wonderful.”

Eighty-eight years old and still actively practicing law—Piel has flouted convention all her life. Not only did she enter law school at a time when few women pursued a graduate degree, but she chose criminal law and proceeded to work alone. Piel is also unusual for her unwillingness to specialize in one area of criminal law. She’s taken on civil rights cases, class-action suits for gender discrimination, and, in her later years, death penalty appeals. But she has also handled the odd case of patent infringement (over the Movado watch), anarchy, and libel (including for Nobel Peace Laureate Linus Pauling; she lost). She has argued before the U.S. Supreme Court four times—“but I only won once,” she is quick to point out.

Says Linda Greenhouse, Yale Law School’s Knight Distinguished Journalist in Residence, “Back then, women lawyers mostly got channeled into trusts and estates and matrimonial issues. Very few chose the gritty business of representing convicted murderers.” Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times until last year, first met the diminutive, elegant Piel back in 1971, while a cub reporter assigned to a murder-by-arson case. “Eleanor has devoted her energies to the most downtrodden, despised, friendless segment of our society.”

Not surprisingly, Piel has collected a bottomless treasure chest of stories, and she relates them with a delightful Audrey Hepburnesque diction. They reveal that Piel is no accidental activist—her ambition has always been to make a difference in the world, and her stubbornness originates from a fierce, idealistic desire to see that justice is served for everyone.