Elizabeth Schneider: Pioneering Voice in Civil and Women’s Rights
After five decades of teaching at Brooklyn Law School, Elizabeth Schneider, Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, announced her retirement at the end of the Spring 2025 semester.
Over the next few years, Schneider continued as a staff attorney at CCR, litigating cases in state and federal trial and appellate courts while she and Copelon taught Women and the Law. In 1980, encouraged by Professor Arthur Kinoy of Rutgers Law School, one of the founders of CCR, she became staff attorney and then acting administrative director of the Rutgers Law School Constitutional Litigation Clinic, headed by Professor Frank Askin.
In 1983 she was hired as an Associate Professor at Brooklyn Law School on a tenure-track to teach Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure (and continue teaching Women and the Law, now alone, since Copelon had been hired to teach full-time at CUNY Law School). David G. Trager had just become dean. “I was happy to move to teach at Brooklyn,” Schneider said. “When women joined law school faculties at that time, they didn’t necessarily have backgrounds in litigation and constitutional law. I had a decade of experience as a litigator, and had been teaching constitutional litigation, so that helped. Having been an adjunct professor and known Brooklyn Law School students and faculty, I loved the school, and I loved my students. And others on the faculty then, like Stacy Caplow, Susan Herman, Minna Kotkin, Marsha Garrison, Maryellen Fullerton, Margaret Berger, Nancy Fink, and Joe Crea were very supportive of my work. Crea and others had a thirst for curricular innovation and developing new law school projects, like the law school clinics that Stacy Caplow spearheaded, particularly if they involved helping people who were marginalized. And Brooklyn Law School had been a pioneer in its early welcome to women law students and then women law faculty.”
As Schneider now announces her retirement, effective at the close of the Spring 2025 semester, the Law School community celebrates her, her contributions to Brooklyn Law School, and her illustrious career. She has had a lasting impact on her students, colleagues, and the growth of Brooklyn Law School as an institution, teaching first-year courses and developing new upper-level courses such as Domestic Violence and the Law, and a seminar on Federal Civil Litigation, Public Law and Justice, and continuing to teach Women and the Law (now called Gender and the Law). She has led important changes to the Law School’s profile in public service. When she joined the faculty as an adjunct professor in 1974, there were no public interest student organizations at the law school. In 1986, she and alumnus Bertram Bronzaft ’61 founded the Edward V. Sparer Public Interest Law Fellowship Program which in 2026 will celebrate its 40th year. And on the national stage, she remains a highly respected figure in legal education and a scholar in civil procedure, women’s rights, domestic violence, and gender law.
Bringing Public Interest Law to Brooklyn Law School
In 1984, Schneider recognized the need to develop a public-interest law program at Brooklyn Law and began formulating plans. She was influenced by her positive experience with NYU Law School’s robust clinical programs and her experience at NYU as an Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Fellow. The Hays Fellowship Program, led by Professor Norman Dorsen, established one-year fellowships for students to engage in research and gain hands-on experience in litigation and policy work with public interest organizations. She was also inspired by the pioneering scholarship in the fields of poverty and health law of the late University of Pennsylvania Professor Edward V. Sparer, a 1959 graduate of Brooklyn Law who Schneider had known professionally. They had a warm respect for each other’s scholarship and were in communication before he passed away, just as Schneider joined the full-time faculty.
With generous financial support from Bronzaft, a former classmate of Sparer’s on the Brooklyn Law Review, and with the dedicated collaboration of faculty with public-interest expertise, including Professor and former Dean of Clinical and Experiential Education Stacy Caplow, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Professor of Law Susan Herman, late Professor Minna Kotkin and many others, the fellowship program, named in honor of Sparer, was launched with its first cohort of students in 1986. As of 2025, the Sparer program counts nearly 800 fellows.
“We were one of the first law schools in the country to develop a public interest fellowship program that could last for the full three years of law school. The goal was to help sustain students’ public interest commitment,” Schneider said. “And many of the traditions that we started are still carried out, such as the annual symposium that brings together activists and scholars and monthly lunches so that the fellows can be part of a supportive community. These programs helped to cement student and alumni relationships that lead to sustaining that ongoing commitment and to our students getting jobs. That’s very important.”
In a Sparer 35th anniversary tribute to Schneider, Professors Caplow, Herman, and Kotkin wrote, “We were present at the birth of the Sparer Program and have proudly watched as the program grew, matured, and became one of the most important components of Brooklyn Law School. You launched our national identity as a law school that supports and nourishes public interest students. Your energy and commitment never flagged.”
“You laid the groundwork for generations of BLS students to work together during and after law school to create a more just and equal society,” wrote Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship Cynthia Godsoe, who assumed co-directorship of the Sparer Fellowship from Schneider in 2019 and held that role until 2025. It is now co-directed by Professor Vijay Raghavan, Professor Danielle Tully, and Adjunct Professor of Clinical Law & Executive Director of the Public Service Law Center Amy Hsieh ’11, who is a Sparer Fellow alum.
Breaking Ground in Scholarship and Teaching
Over more than 50 years, Schneider has authored a raft of influential and wide-ranging scholarly articles, such as early work “The Dialectic of Rights and Politics: Perspectives on the Women’s Movement” (1986), which was honored in 2000 in a 75th-anniversary retrospective volume as one of the most influential articles published in the New York University Law Review. Other widely cited articles by Schneider include “Gender and Engendering Process” (1993), “Feminist Legal Theory, Feminist Lawmaking and the Legal Profession” (with Cynthia Grant Bowman) (1998), “Grief, Procedure and Justice: The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund” (2003), “The Dangers of Summary Judgment: Gender and Federal Civil Litigation” (2007), “The Changing Shape of Federal Civil Procedure: The Disparate Impact on Civil Rights and Employment Discrimination Cases” (2010), and “Only Procedural: Thoughts on the Substantive Dimensions of Preliminary Procedural Decisions in Employment Discrimination Cases” (with Hon. Nancy Gertner) (2013).
Examining the legal landscape of domestic violence, Schneider wrote the book Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press, 2000), which won the 2000 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers Book Award in the legal category and was nominated by Yale University Press for a Pulitzer Prize. In 2001, Dean and President Emerita Joan G. Wexler named Schneider the Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, an endowed professorship named in honor of Hoffer, a Class of 1954 alumna and longtime supporter of the Law School through her involvement in the Alumni Association and through generous scholarship assistance.
Another of Schneider’s key works, the 2011 book Women and the Law Stories, co-edited with Stephanie M. Wildman, then of Santa Clara Law School, and part of the Stories series published by Foundation Press in many fields. The book explores landmark and lesser-known cases on women’s legal rights, offering accounts of the litigants, history, parties, strategies, and theoretical implications, with different chapters written by feminist legal scholars. “What is special about this book is that we didn’t just pick famous cases,” said Schneider. “We also picked those we thought had a lot to tell about activism, justice, and social change. It’s one of the books I use in my Gender and the Law class, and students are blown away by the fact that there was so much activism in the past. I want them to read the book because I want them to know what was going on then and have a sense of how much is now taken for granted.”
As part of her pioneering work integrating domestic violence into legal education, Schneider and co-author Clare Dalton, then of Northeastern University Law School, wrote one of the first law school casebooks for courses on domestic violence, Battered Women and the Law (Foundation Press, 2001). The book’s second edition, retitled as Domestic Violence and the Law: Theory and Practice, followed in 2007 with Judith G. Greenberg of New England/Boston Law School, and the third in 2013, with co-authors Greenberg, Emily J. Sack of Roger Williams University School of Law, and the late Cheryl Hanna of Vermont Law School.
As Schneider retires from Brooklyn Law School, her scholarship continues. A fourth edition of Domestic Violence and the Law is now in the works, with co-authors Emily Sack, Natalie Nanasi of Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law, and Jessica Miles of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. Schneider has also completed a new article circling back to her 2007 work “The Dangers of Summary Judgment: Gender and Federal Civil Litigation,” which helped to open the field of gender and civil procedure. This new article, examining the role of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission amicus briefs in impacting federal court determinations of gender and summary judgment cases, “Gender and Summary Judgment Revisited: EEOC Amicus Briefs, Muldrow and Loper Bright,” will be published later in 2025 in the American Journal of Law and Equality, a Harvard Law School faculty peer-reviewed journal co-edited by Professors Martha Minow, Randall Kennedy, and Cass Sunstein published annually by MIT Press.
The Path from Activism to Law
For Schneider, who participated in the March on Washington at age 15 (“a momentous experience for me,” she said) and was involved in civil rights and anti-war protests while an undergrad at Bryn Mawr College, activism also led to an important realization.
“As a college student in the 1960s, active in civil rights struggles and other political work and studying political science and social theory, I saw examples from the civil rights movement of lawyers using the law to advance political efforts,” Schneider wrote in her introduction to Battered Women. “I became actively involved in the women’s movement, and my experience as an activist gave me the impetus to attend law school. It was 1970, and efforts to reshape the law to include women’s experiences were just beginning. If women were to secure the protection of the law, women with a feminist perspective would have to become lawyers.”
That conviction was reinforced in 1969 when, as she was making her final decision about whether to pursue a Ph.D. or a law degree, she traveled to Chicago with others from CCR to observe the trial of the “Chicago Seven,” those accused of conspiracy involving the anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. “It was the day that [Black Panther Party cofounder] Bobby Seale was ordered by the judge to be bound and gagged after interrupting the proceedings,” Schneider said. “It was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen. That experience of being in that courtroom and seeing what was going on just pushed me, right there, into the law.” Later, at NYU Law School, Schneider became involved in the school’s criminal defense clinic, established by Professor Harry Subin, and was able to be lead counsel, under faculty supervision, in a felony trial which resulted in acquittal in her third year of law school.
From 1978 to 1980, then at the Center for Constitutional Rights, Schneider helped to found and coordinate the Women’s Self-Defense Law Project, a joint project of CCR and the National Jury Project that consulted and assisted on problems of sex discrimination in homicide and assault cases involving women (primarily those who were domestic violence victims). Among the cases Schneider and her team argued was the historic State of Washington v. Wanrow (1975-1979), in which she presented a criminal appeal and preparation for the homicide trial of a Native American woman whose claim of self-defense involved protecting her child, who had been attacked by a white man who was a known child molester. Schneider and the all-woman team from CCR won in a plurality opinion. When Schneider served as amicus in State v. Gladys Kelly, arguing in the New Jersey Supreme Court while teaching at Rutgers Law School, the Court permitted the admission of expert testimony on battering. Both of these cases and Schneider’s scholarship on these issues have been included in several leading criminal law casebooks.
A National and International Presence
While at Brooklyn Law School, Schneider also served for more than a dozen years, beginning in 1989, as visiting professor at Harvard Law School, teaching Women and the Law, Domestic Violence and the Law in many January terms, as well as teaching Civil Procedure and other courses for the full academic year in 1991. She has also taught as a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, as an adjunct professor at Fordham Law School, and as an adjunct professor at NYU Law School. She has given invited lectures at many law schools and other institutions in the U.S. and internationally.
Schneider has conducted programs with women’s organizations in China and with the Federation of Women Lawyers in Vietnam, among others. In 1995, she was invited to be part of a delegation of U.S. lawyers who consulted and assisted South African lawyers and judges to develop the South African constitution, led by Professor Frank Michelman at Harvard Law School. She later returned to South Africa to meet and advise lawyers and judges on issues concerning domestic violence. “This international work has been so meaningful to me,” Schneider said.
In addition, Schneider has been an influential national figure in U.S. legal education reform. She served a three-year term as a member of the Executive Committee as of the Association of American Law School (AALS), was Chair of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, was a member of the Board of Governors of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), and a member of the American Law Institute. She worked for several years with the National Association of Women Judges (NAWJ), developing innovative educational programs for federal and state judges. She has been honored by numerous organizations.
Schneider reflected on her long and storied career at the Law School with warmth.
“I am grateful for many years at Brooklyn Law School. I have been privileged to be able to teach terrific students, work with talented and supportive colleagues, and help to build the institution,” she said. “Now, I am looking forward to new adventures.”
At the end of the Spring 2025 semester, Elizabeth Schneider, Rose L. Hoffer Professor of Law, announced her retirement. Following a time-honored Brooklyn Law School tradition, faculty members joined her students to give Schneider a standing ovation at the end of her last class to applaud her extraordinary career, scholarship, and mentorship.