Maria Marcus, Public Interest Lawyer and Professor, Dies at 88

Maria Marcus, a regulation professor who as a public curiosity lawyer defended civil rights within the South and efficiently argued six circumstances earlier than the USA Supreme Court docket representing New York State, in a single occasion successful unemployment advantages for putting employees, died on April 27 at her residence in Manhattan. She was 88.

Her loss of life was confirmed by her daughter Valerie Marcus.

Professor Marcus argued the circumstances earlier than the Supreme Court docket representing the New York legal professional normal. She was an assistant legal professional normal from 1967 to 1978 and chief of the workplace’s litigation bureau from 1976 to 1978.

In early 1979, the courtroom agreed, 6-to-3, in New York Phone v. New York State Division of Labor, that the state was empowered to require firms to pay unemployment advantages to putting employees. (Professor Marcus argued the case in 1978.)

The justices rejected the argument by the telephone firm that as a result of the regulation implicitly favored labor over administration, it needed to yield to federal labor legal guidelines calling for governmental neutrality. In its ruling, the courtroom affirmed an appellate courtroom’s choice that held that although the regulation positioned the state on the facet of labor throughout a strike, Congress had not imposed a uniform nationwide coverage on jobless advantages for strikers, leaving it to the states to determine.

In line with the Supreme Court docket Historic Society, of the 160 girls who’ve argued earlier than the courtroom since 1880, solely eight appeared greater than Professor Marcus. She was tied for ninth place with 5 legal professionals, together with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for probably the most arguments by a girl earlier than the courtroom from 1880 to 1980.

She taught on the Fordham College Faculty of Regulation from 1978 till her retirement in 2011. She was solely the second girl to change into a tenured full professor there.

Professor Marcus moderated Fordham’s award-winning moot courtroom program for 42 years. In 1995, a staff of hers received the Nationwide Moot Court docket Competitors sponsored by the New York Metropolis Bar Affiliation and the American Faculty of Trial Legal professionals.

She was credited with writing one of many earliest regulation overview articles on home violence, “Conjugal Violence: The Regulation of Power and the Power of Regulation,” in 1981.

Decide Nicholas Garaufis of Federal District Court docket in Brooklyn, who was a co-counsel on the unemployment advantages case earlier than the Supreme Court docket, described Professor Marcus in a telephone interview as a “rigorous litigator who was a perfectionist, however a tremendously affected person mentor.”

Matthew Diller, the dean of Fordham’s regulation college, wrote in an electronic mail that her “essential legacy is within the generations of scholars whom she taught — stressing the values of integrity, readability and precision and a way of pleasure within the mental backwards and forwards of reasoned argument that’s authorized advocacy at its greatest.”

Maria Eleanor Erica Lenhoff was born on June 23, 1933, in Vienna. Her father, Arthur Lenhoff, was a decide on the Austrian Constitutional Court docket, the nation’s highest tribunal. Her mom, Clara (Gruber) Lenhoff, was a homemaker.

On the day that Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, the household fled, first to Switzerland, then to England and at last to the USA. Her father, a Jew, was on the Gestapo’s needed checklist for his authorized rulings requiring spiritual equality in universities — selections that Professor Marcus later likened, in an article, to America’s civil rights case regulation as “Austria’s Pre-Battle Brown v. Board of Schooling.”

“Drawing on this expertise, she had a profound sense of the significance of justice and the rule of regulation,” mentioned William M. Treanor, the dean and govt vice chairman of Georgetown College Regulation Middle. “I discovered a fantastic deal from her work, which mixed extraordinary erudition with a dedication to regulation as a power for good.”

Professor Marcus earned a bachelor’s diploma in English from Oberlin Faculty in Ohio in 1954 and graduated in 1957 from Yale Regulation Faculty. There she met and married Norman Marcus, who turned normal counsel to the New York Metropolis Planning Fee. He died in 2008.

Along with her daughter Valerie, who’s the vice chairman of authorized affairs at RCA Information, she is survived by two different youngsters, Nicole and Eric Marcus, and 6 grandchildren.

Professor Marcus served as affiliate counsel for the N.A.A.C.P.’s nationwide workplace from 1961 to 1967 and litigated important civil rights circumstances within the South. She collaborated with Robert L. Carter, the final counsel, and Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P. chief in Mississippi.

She was vice chairman of the Affiliation of the Bar of the Metropolis of New York from 1995 to 1996 and in 1973 headed an affiliation committee that advisable that the Metropolis Council cross laws to bar discrimination on the premise of sexual orientation.

Professor Marcus, colleagues mentioned, had an uncanny knack for memorizing the names and faces of her college students on the primary day of sophistication. After she retired, she continued to average Fordham Regulation’s Moot Court docket Board for an additional decade.

Professor James Kainen recalled in a Fordham obituary that her efficiency would immediate a frequent lament by the Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, the previous president of Fordham.

“Yearly throughout his tenure,” Professor Kainen mentioned, “President O’Hare would come to certainly one of our college conferences and by no means didn’t bemoan his incapacity to rent a soccer coach who would compile a file approaching that of Maria’s moot courtroom groups.”