Family law attorney Theresa Lyons discusses her life’s trajectory, as well as the societal pressures that she felt growing up as part of the LGBT community during the height of the AIDS crisis and learning and teaching within Catholic school systems. She not only is a practicing lawyer, but also has her Master’s in Social Work. She has pioneered several activities and organizations, including the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, and is the managing partner of Lyons & Associates, P.C.
“So the law is supposed to be predictable and conservative because without those rules, there would be anarchy. So that’s number one. Number two: law is a reflection of humanity.”
ANNOTATIONS
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TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by John Keller
Somerville, New Jersey
October 21, 2019
Transcription by Chrissy Briskin
00:00
This is John Keller, with coLAB Arts and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. It is Monday, October 21, 2019 at approximately 11:35 in the morning. We are located at Lyons and Associates in Somerville, New Jersey and we are interviewing today:
Terry Lyons
Terry Lyons. Fantastic. And Terry, could you just spell your name for us.
Sure. My official name is Theresa, T-H-E-R-E-S-A, last name Lyons, L-Y-O-N-S. People call me Terry, T-E-R-R-Y.
What town do you currently reside in?
I live in Somerset.
Great. So, as I mentioned, we’ll just kind of start at the beginning. Where were you born?
Oscoda, Michigan.
Oscoda, Michigan.
Yes. I was a military brat. My father was in the Air Force and so I was born way up north there, where I’m told the weather is cold, but people are warm. [Laughter]
Did you have that experience of it?
I was a very small child when we moved out of there, so I don’t recall how warm or not people were.
What was your family structure like when you were born?
I– my father was in the military, my mom had been– went to school for science, she at the time, I believe, was not working because my dad had moved around so much being in the military, so I was the first born child to my two parents in 1969 I was born.
And what were some of your– you weren’t in Michigan very long, what were some of your earliest memories of the place?
I think I actually do have a memory of Michigan. I think it was when my brother was born, he was two years younger than I was, and somewhere around the age of three, I believe I was three and he might have been one, and he knocked a glass or something off a counter and I remember picking it up and cutting my hand and needing stitches. I remember that. I was about three. I think that’s my earliest memory of Michigan, and then from there we moved to Omaha, Nebraska, the middle of the nation, and then eventually I believe I lived in Philly for a year while my dad was stationed in Turkey, and then when my father left the military, we eventually settled in New Jersey permanently when I was about five years old.
Right around the time you were starting school?
Right around the time I was starting school.
And what was starting– what was school life like?
So I have a recollection of going to St. Paul’s grammar school in Highland Park for a couple of weeks, and then eventually I wound up in public school in New Brunswick. I grew up in New Brunswick in the Rutgers Village section of New Brunswick and went to grade school there through the end of sixth grade. And then, I was a pretty bad kid, I got in a lot of trouble, fights, all kinds of things, so my parents yanked me out of there and threw me in Catholic school for grades seven and eight. Then eventually I went to St. Pious X High School, which is now closed. A lot of Catholic schools are closing, as St. Paul’s is closed as well.
So, uh, what were those, um, I guess the question I have is when did you first become aware, like, in that time around we either hit puberty or we’re having a better understanding of ourselves, when did you first have an understanding or concept of gender or gender difference, or roles, you know, that people have in society when it comes to gender, or other identities?
I think, interestingly, I myself am a member of the gay and lesbian community, funny I actually met my wife the first day of high school in religion class. And I remember the moment that I met her, I was late to class, it was fifth period, Mrs. Pickering’s religion class, and she had us all sitting in a circle, and my now wife, then person that I met, she wound up being our high school valedictorian, so very vested in academia, and so she was there early of course, with her notebook all out, her knee socks pulled up very appropriately in her Catholic school uniform, taking notes diligently and copiously, and I walked in late and a mess as usual and I remember the instant that I saw her. And instantly wondering who is that? Now at the time I don’t think that either one of us realized our eventual intimate attraction to each other, but there was definitely something different about the moment that I saw her, and she also recalls the moment that she saw me and it was out of the ordinary, and I think as that relationship began to blossom when you– it’s interesting, I was born in 1969 which is the year of the Stonewall Riots, and we recently went to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York, and I can talk about how I believe that has come full circle in some of the things that I have seen. And so to come into our own adolescence at the height of the AIDS crisis, in the middle of a Catholic school in suburban New Jersey, not really understanding ourselves, it was an interesting time as I look back on that perspective.
5:59
Um, what was your high school at the time? Did you start developing specific interests, either academically, or with hobbies or–
So I was very drawn to purposeful chaos and change making as an adolescent. I, you know, was always the one leading the clubs that were trying to overthrow the establishment. And again, my wife was our class’s valedictorian, I was voted Most Daring. So if it was something that was different or wacky, I wanted to do it. Not that I was good at doing it, but I wanted to do it.
Was there any sort of subject area that you sort of settled at?
Believe it or not, I was really good in Spanish. Spanish was my thing and I was one of those kids who, I was too smart for the regular classes, but too dumb for honors classes, so I was always the dumbest kid in the honors class, or the smartest kid in the regular class, and so when I was in all the regular classes, people would look at me as the nerd, and when I was in all of the honors classes people just thought I was, you know, like, dumb and the class clown, so it was an interesting place to be.
Was it an expectation or a foregone conclusion in your family that you would go to college?
Yes. Both my parents went to college, and a little interesting fact when you talk about, I don’t know if this relates to gender identity at all, but my parents were part of the first people in the world that were matched by computers to eventually get married. So my parents in the mid-1960s, both of my parents went to Catholic colleges in Philadelphia. My dad was at St. Joe’s, my mom was at Chestnut Hill in Philly, they otherwise would not have met, and there were a number of graduate students at one of these universities that was doing a– their graduate thesis was, “Can you match people by computers?” And so they went to five area colleges and they asked every college student to pay two dollars, which I guess is the equivalent of twenty bucks today, and that’s how they funded the study. And they had psychology students make up the personality questions, they had math students do some of the statistical analysis and they had graduate students in this new field of computers run the programming to match them based on people’s answers, they would match up people and my parents who otherwise were complete random strangers were matched as part of this graduate thesis and eventually came to be married. So I think that, you know for me, today I am a divorce lawyer, or family law attorney, I don’t like to say divorce lawyer because what we do is about the makeup and the break up of the family, and how American families are changing, but it’s ironic to me that my parents were initially matched at the genesis of this new technology and here I am fifty-some years later, my life in many ways tracks the Stonewall movement, that now I’m the managing partner of one of this state’s most prestigious law firms helping to adjudicate how people makeup and break up their families. It’s an interesting trend, I think.
10:06
When you– kind of making your way into college, what were some of the– what was your perspective on the world? Did you have kind of an idea of what you wanted to try to accomplish at that time in your life?
Not really, I was pretty lost, it took me five years to graduate. I went to a state school and it took me five years to graduate. I eventually graduated, oddly enough with a degree in Spanish and a minor in business, um, my wife Linda and I eventually wound up getting together in college and there’s all that push and pull with can we be together, can we not be together, what does it mean, buh, buh, buh, go on with that. Not really.
Was the push and pull societal?
Yeah, I think mostly– mostly societal. You know, I remember one particular moment where my now wife said to me, “I have no idea how I’m going to live with you, but I know I can’t live without you.” And I think a lot of that, again, you have to realize, coming of age during that period of time, right? So much of it was still illegal, immoral, unheard of in so much of our society, even in the liberal bastion that is New Jersey. So yeah, I really– college, I worked a lot, I always was a worker. I worked a lot and wound up graduating. I was interested, actually, I did do something now since we’re talking about, I guess you’re working in the theatre, I did do something with the Spanish club where they had a theatre program that would put on bilingual plays. I went to Montclair State and they would put on bilingual plays for grade school students to come on a field trip day. I was involved in that. I was a techie. I would sit up in the techie stage, the techie booth, and do all the lighting and sound and all of that for their– for the Spanish speaking plays for all these grade school students that would come and be–
Did you have an idea of what you were, what your goals were, what you wanted to do after college?
I had no idea, I took the LSATs at the time, I didn’t remember taking them at the time, I had no idea. I got out, I got a job, I was fired from my first job because apparently I didn’t know what I was doing, and then eventually got a job at UMDNJ working at a program for teen parents and their kids, and then eventually got a job teaching at St. Peter’s High School, it was funny I taught religion and Spanish. I remember, as part of that I had to sign a behavioral contract at the time, that I would live my life according to the tenets of the Catholic Church and I remember being very conflicted at the time signing that document, knowing the relationship that I was in, but I nevertheless signed it and worked there for a number of years. I was told I wasn’t a bad teacher and then eventually left that to go to graduate school.
What was the, um, what was it like for you being an educator seeing the next generation and reflecting on issues they were dealing with at the time? Did you notice any specific thing?
I remember, you know, every generation has, I think, several defining moments, one moment in particular that I remember about the generation of students I was teaching was the day that the OJ Simpson verdict came down. I remember at the time, I was actually in my classroom and someone had a radio and I remember when they– everyone was on pins and needles that day, we knew the verdict was going to come down and it happened to be in my classroom, and if I remember correctly the time of the day that the verdict came down in California made it in the afternoon here in New Jersey, I believe it was after lunch, and I remember there being a radio, and the moment the verdict came in, instantly the African American students had this burst of elation. They were so happy, they screamed with joy. At the same moment, non African American students were shocked, befuddled, put their heads down, couldn’t believe it, and I remember seeing this play out in front of me, this instant expression of extreme emotion on either side. Now, I did not fully understand the weight of that moment, historically what had come before or after. Now fast forward, I’m a foster and adoptive parent and all my kids are African American and I’ve been in the car with them when they’ve been pulled over for driving while black. I’ve, you know, now studied more on the Central Park Five and I’ve seen my own children be looked at suspiciously by shopkeepers for no other reason than the color of their skin is dark. And it’s interesting to me when these things happen because I don’t look like my children, shopkeepers, police, other people don’t expect me to be their parent, they automatically assume that my children and I are strangers to each other so they of course– I think if those authority figures knew I was the child’s parent, they probably would not act as raw or as true when interacting with my children, so I didn’t– seeing what I see now from the struggles my own children face, and I have witnessed it with my own eyes, and I wouldn’t have believed it if you would have asked me– and this is the interesting thing, back when I was a teacher, and I remember that moment of OJ Simpson’s acquittal, and I remember at the time, very much so being disturbed, as disturbed as all of the other white students that were in my classroom, and not understanding the elation of the African American students there, and not only not understanding it, I found myself being angry and upset at them. Now as a teacher in the moment, what I had to do was say, “Okay, okay everyone, calm down, calm down.” I remember I got the class calmed down and I think we eventually went on with the lesson. So my job in the moment was to be the teacher and the adult and calm everyone down, but in retrospect today, now twenty some, twenty five years later and having my own African American children, I now understand why– because of so– because before OJ Simpson, there were so many African Americans who were, for lack of a better word, were railroaded, were lynched, did not get a fair trial simply because they were black and it was the OJ Simpson, for right or for wrong, for good or for bad, marked the first time in American history where the color of the justice system was neither white, nor black, but green, the color of money. So now looking at it full circle with my own children today, I can understand why there was such elation at that moment.
18:25
Um,
I know this is nothing to do with gender identity, but–
No, no, that’s great. I think it’s, you know, what was the– I think it relates to that– what was the impetus to– had you always had the idea that you were going to leave education in that sense and move into law?
Not at all, so I left teaching and while I was teaching I had started taking a few classes in the masters, MSW program at Rutgers. Sorry, you hear stuff going on here. We are a busy law firm. [Laughter]. And so eventually I applied for, and I got accepted to full time Masters Degree program. While I was there in the MSW program, they had a class called Law and Social Work. And Law and Social Work was a mandatory class back then that taught social workers how to respond to subpoenas, what do you do when those mean lawyers want your records, confidentiality, HIPAA, all that stuff, and at the time, the professor who taught it intrigued me and they had just authored a new dual degree program where you could get both a law degree and a social work degree at the same time. It intrigued me and so I became– I applied and I became one of the first two people in the state of New Jersey to get this dual degree program where I have both a Masters Degree in Social Work and a full law degree. And the way they did that is a law degree is three years full time, and MSW is two years full time, each program collapsed one semester of their electives and counted the other. So in 2002 I became one of the first two people in the entire state of New Jersey to get this dual degree of both a law degree and an MSW at the same time.
And, uh, do you feel like that fit what your goals were?
I don’t know if it fit what my goals were. I will tell you this, that experience of being one of the first two really made me a guinea pig and also, as I look back, that divergence of that moment when the OJ Simpson verdict came down, I think there was another defining moment in my education which I believe has punctuated fluidity of thought. I don’t know if, by the way, I don’t know if fluidity of thought can be punctuated. But if it can be, this is the story that I think would do that. There is a very famous case called Tarasoff vs. The Regents of California and it’s the main case that talks about duty to warn, which, by the way, I do believe has impacted the gay, lesbian, trans, queer community disproportionally, and I’ll get into why in a moment, but basically the story of Tarasoff was that there was a guy who was in therapy in Berkeley out in California, he told his therapist, “I’m going to kill my girlfriend.” The therapist called the campus police, the campus police talked to the guy, he was like, “No, no, I’m kidding.” I’m summarizing basically, and he went on to kill the girlfriend anyway. And the parents of the girlfriend sued and sued the therapist and said, “You didn’t do anything to protect my daughter.” And the rule of law that came out from that is that there is a duty to warn, if there is a mental health professional rendering therapy and everything that happens in therapy is confidential and remains a secret, unless the person who is in therapy or treatment presents an imminent danger to himself or other people. So talking about fluidity of thought and this case that I had to study, I first had to read this case when I was a part of the MSW program and I’m sitting at Rutgers University, I’m surrounded by social workers and we’re reading this case and the conversation after class, the discussion is, “Oh my God, lawyers are vipers, I can’t believe they sued this poor therapist, don’t they understand the need for client confidentiality, you know, we’re trying to save the world and the courts are always interfering,” and it was just very much, very sympathetic to this poor therapist and hating the law. Fast forward the very next semester I find myself sitting in first chair torts and I’m at Rutgers, I’m at law school at Rutgers, and we read the exact same case, exact same case. And the discussion after class is, “Is psychology really a science? These bleeding heart self helpers don’t understand the need for the rule of law and protection of greater society.” I was reading the exact same case, exact same facts, exact same university, both graduate level and the only difference of perspective was in what seat I was sitting. So, I don’t know if that opened my mind, or made more of a mind fuck, excuse my language, but I think that really helped cement fluidity of thought, and again I don’t know if you can cement fluidity of thought. So after that, and I did a lot of things in law school too, I really tried to be a pioneer. I was the founding editor-in-chief of the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion, first of its kind in the world, examines the interplay of law and religion and one of the first, our first issue, we actually brought down the Rutgers University servers because we brokered a deal involving the Nuremberg Documents from the Nuremberg Trial. Long story short, there was a guy, William Donovan I believe was his name, he sat second chair at the Nuremberg Trials, and the Nuremberg Trials were the trials post World War Two that were prosecuting the Nazis, two weeks before the trial William Donovan had a falling out with the first chair so he left. He came to New York, he started a law firm, he had a closet in his office after he died, his secretary went to clear out his office and they found something like sixty two or sixty seven boxes of intact Nuremberg Documents that he had never told anyone that he had. So his family donated them to Cornell Law. They had no idea what to do with these– so at the time when I was at Rutgers Law and we founded this Journal of Law and Religion, one of the people that was on the Journal, I want to say it was a neighbor or babysat a kid of the research librarian at Cornell. So I walk into the dean’s office at Rutgers Law and I’m like, “Can you give me twelve hundred bucks? We want to drive up to Cornell, we want to see if we can talk to the librarian up there.” The Dean at the time, Dean Salmon, said, “Okay, go, why not?” Long story short, we brokered a deal whereby Columbia, not Columbia, Cornell agreed to preserve the documents and Rutgers Law School agreed to digitize them. And we, the Rutgers Journal of Law and Religion was the first publication to bring these trial documents to the world, and the first day they went up they brought the Rutgers server down. What we did was we found a hundred and sixty three page document that was Hitler’s, Hitler and the Nazi’s plan for using the church as an arm of the propaganda. So there were Nazi officials that were in charge of what songs would be sung at church, what sermons would be sung at church, what the churches would get, and it was really interesting, it was the use of the state through religion for that propaganda. So we published that. Another thing I remember about that trip, we were up there, and this is so crazy, we’re sitting there a bunch of law students, we’re in sweat pants and we’re holding these documents in our– .now they’re probably guarded by you know whatever [laughter]. So I remember I was holding in my hand what appeared to be, and it was crazy, it appeared to be a letter that was written from Hitler to Mussolini and then like the typed translation, and I don’t know if it was like a redone copy, because, again, these were the second chair’s trial documents, which tell me it was a copy of the original, but anyway, I’m reading this letter and it’s like from Adolf to Mussolini and it’s like, “Duce, I know you’ve heard, we’ve just begun our invasion of Russia and we expect to prevail by the end of the year because the Russians are weak.” And it says, “I know you’ve heard rumors about the Americans coming in, but don’t worry because they’re not strong and those capitalists don’t have the stomach for battle.” Really just putting down the Russians and putting down– and it ends with something stupid like, “Love to your wife, Duce, Adolf.” And you know I’m sitting there holding these things– anyway, so that was part of my law school training and I wound up when I graduated, I graduated with high honors and I graduated and that was law school, and I was also given in the MSW program the dean’s award for Most Outstanding MSW Program for pioneering this dual degree program in the state of New Jersey, so that was my graduate formation.
28:34
Did you have an idea of what would be next?
I was lucky I secured a clerkship at the New Jersey Supreme Court, and to further punctuate, to further cement fluidity of thought, I was, me, as a crazy, leftist, liberal, bra-burning, wacky lesbian with black children, wound up clerking for the New Jersey Supreme Court Justice who was the former attorney general accused of racial profiling. Republican attorney general. And he, Peter Verniero was his name, and he now writes the rules of court, very influential member of the bar I have a lot of respect for, and he at the New Jersey Supreme Court, every justice gets three law clerks, the chief used to get five, because two did nothing but death penalty, but I don’t know that that really happens anymore in New Jersey, but this justice that I clerked for purposely every year would choose one law clerk that he thought was in opposition to him, politically because he wanted to foster academic thought, so we would have conversations in chambers. He’d say, “Terry, what do you think?” And I’d say, “Well, on behalf of the entire left of the world” [laughter]. And I was actually clerking at the New Jersey Supreme Court on 9/11, and I remember at the time, one of the main questions was, “Should the courts close?” Most people don’t realize that even though the courts are “open” from 8:30 to 4:30, the courts are actually open twenty four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year because of emergency evictions, domestic violence, arrests, search warrants. The courts, believe it or not, are open– open all the time with emergent judges always. There’s always one judge in one municipality, county, and there is always a Supreme Court justice on call. Um, and the question at the time was, “Do they close the courts,” because no one knew what was happening, it was a crazy day, I’m sure everyone has their own 9/11 story, but there was that public policy, “Yes, we’re under attack, yes, it’s a matter of public emergency, the courts however are backstopped for other emergencies.” Right? When there’s emergent evictions, or arrests, or violence, and so there was that real, I remember that discussion that people were having. I also remember immediately after 9/11, security getting crazy, wacky in the courts and we used to have to do fire drills in judge’s chambers. It was ridiculous, they shut down all kinds of emails and it was an interesting time to be at New Jersey’s highest court to see that branch’s response to the national and regional crisis.
Um, the story about, you know, “On behalf of the world’s left,” what was it like at that time, you know, navigating your personal life and your personal identity and then your professional life and identity, recognizing– I guess part of what I’m trying to figure out is that being in the law, and even in the court system, that’s traditionally a very conservative kind of place in terms of how your personal life interacts with that sphere, versus, what your personal life was like at that time and living out your, an identity that might be considered othered in that space.
So, you’re right that the law is conservative and predictable and it’s supposed to be. The purpose of law is not justice, the purpose of law is to prevent anarchy. So the law is supposed to be predictable and conservative because, without those rules, there would be anarchy. So that’s number one. Number two, with that being said, law is a reflection of humanity. So Justice Louis Brandeis once said, “If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.” And so, yes, it’s supposed to be regimented, and conservative, but if it is not respectable, if it does not in some way comport or comply with how people feel today, then you’ll have anarchy the other way. Right? So, the role of the law, if you think of a family where you have a strict parent with an adolescent, and it’s the job of a strict parent to tell the adolescent no so that the adolescent takes only one step toward craziness instead of a hundred? I think that’s really the way law works for society. So, what was that like? Well, I can remember when, in the height of everything going on, and my justice was being investigated by the state senate because of racial profiling that happened on his watch, and, by the way, and again, I go back to the OJ Simpson moment, so law enforcement racially profiles, some of that for very bad reasons, some of that statistically may be for very good reason, I don’t, I don’t, I’m not smart enough to know that, but I do know that during that time, at the same time that this conservative republican justice was being investigated, we were at a barbecue at his home. I’m there with my wife, and my daughter Destiny, at the time who was like two or three, maybe, toddles over to the justice and he is down on one knee trying to cut a hot dog for her. And I remember looking at that moment and saying, “That’s– that’s the guy who’s being vilified.” And it was such a genuine moment. He was helping her cut this little hot dog. No one else was around, he wasn’t doing it for anything other than, here’s a little girl who needs help cutting up her food. And I just remember that, I try to remember that anyone who is glorified or vilified, is still human. So that was interesting. I can tell you that when I was at the Supreme Court– because I was a foster parent I was not allowed to have anything to do with any cases involving child protection, DYFS now DCPP, because it was perceived as a conflict of interest, because when you’re a foster parent you actually get some checks from the state towards day care and some of their medical expenses, so it was seen as a conflict of interest if I weighed in on any child protective cases. Um, I got to write a cert on Sprint, you’re probably too young to remember this, Pete, but there was a company called Sprint that used to charge ten cents a minute and they had this commercial, “We charge ten cents a minute,” and if people were talking on the phone for a partial minute, could they still charge ten cents for the whole minute, and that went all the way up to the New Jersey Supreme Court. I got to weigh in on that, I got to weigh in on some really– look nobody goes to the New Jersey Supreme Court, there’s seven million cases a year that are filed in the state of New Jersey, the Supreme Court hears only a hundred and twenty? So no one gets up there for a traffic ticket. So that was really, you know, I had a lot of pride in it. I will say this, though, this is very interesting, my relationship with my own parents has been extremely tenuous because of their position on the gay and lesbian community and my parents recently even appeared on TV, on Catholic TV, expressing their opinions about people who are afflicted with same sex attraction, but at the time when I was clerking I got, I passed the bar and I got– the Supreme Court Justice offered to have a private swearing in ceremony where we could bring our families for the day, and we had a private swearing in ceremony with a Supreme Court Justice and our families, and we all went out to eat at the Flemington Hotel, Hunterdon Hotel, whatever I forget the name of it, but it’s the hotel that was famous for the Lindbergh trials, we had this incredibly wonderful, historic day, that I was there with my wife, my African American kids, and my parents were not there because, you know, you think of how many parents would be over the moon for their children to have a private swearing in ceremony with a Supreme Court Justice and they were not there because of, you know, their difficulty with the way I am living my life. So, I also can tell you that during that year, you get courted by a lot of people when you have that type of clerkship. Once or twice a week we’d get letters from big firms offering us jobs, so that was interesting as well. So yeah, I clerked there for a year, it was probably the best year of my legal life.
38:37
So how do you make a decision? You’re getting these offers, right, so how do you make a decision?
So here’s the– so when I was a 2L, here’s another story about some of that. Wow. A lot of this is coming back, please forgive me. [Laughter]. So I worked as a second year, between my second and third year of law school, I had a summer associate job at a large firm called Drinker, Biddle and Reath, it was Drinker, Biddle, and Shapley, it is now Drinker, Biddle, and Reath, and it was one of those crazy, bougie jobs where they throw a shit ton of loot at you. Um, they gave us free tennis lessons and free golf lessons, and all the clients are J&J and Disney. You know, you’re making a gajillion bucks and they’re throwing all this money at you. And at the end of this, now this was 2000-1999, 2000, it was the kind of job everybody wanted. At the end of the summer, they offered me a job. There were sixteen people in my class, they offered all of us a job. All fifteen accepted and I told them I wasn’t sure if I was going to take it, and they were shocked, and I remember I was sitting in a meeting with the hiring partner at the time who was a woman, a Caucasian woman and another attorney, African American gentleman, who was a partner there, and it’s funny, notwithstanding the entire firm was very white, very male, very straight, very everything, the two people they put in charge of the baby lawyers were this really amazing sharp woman, white woman, and this nice, very sharp, amazing, African American man. So I’m sitting in a room with them and they’re like, “We’d like to offer you a position,” and I say, “Well thank you very much, I don’t know if I’m going to take it.” They were shocked. They didn’t– they didn’t because everyone else was like, “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and they said, “What do you mean?” And I said, “There’s a couple things, first I want to tell you that I was really disturbed because there was one outing where they put us all in this really fancy bus and they took us to Yankee Stadium where we had box seats, and on the way back one of the partners was drunk and he was telling a gay joke, and you know I just want to make, it was upsetting to me.” They were shocked, they were like, “What? That happened?” And they said, I’ll never forget this, the, um, the African American gentleman, he was just like, you know, he was kind of looking at the woman like, “What are we going to do with this?” And the white female partner said to me, “Terry I understand where you’re coming from, you know that was just really stupid, but you know if you’re going to be a lawyer, there’s, you know, people say things.” And I said to her, I remember I said, “Listen, I’m a big girl, I understand that for the rest of my life I’m going to have to hear gay jokes, just like for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to hear woman jokes.” I looked at Michael and said, “Michael, for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to hear Black jokes. I am not looking for censorship of sanitization. I am simply looking from you, assurances that that is not the firm’s policy to act that way on a regular basis.” And the African American gentleman just kind of shook his head up and down like [laughter] yeah, right? And she’s like, “No,no, no, that’s not it.” And I said, “Well there’s another issue, too. The firm offers no domestic partnership benefits.” This predated–
Yeah–
“Offers no domestic partnership benefits, whatsoever.” And they’re like, “Well– well we don’t even know what would qualify as a domestic partner.” And I said, “Well listen,” I said, “my partner and I have been together since, you know, we were fourteen, we’ve got three kids, you know I’m pretty certain we would pass any muster.” And then she said to me, “You know, there’s other gay people here at the firm, too.” And I said, “Well that begs the question, what does it say about the atmosphere of this place that I don’t know who they are?” And again, the African American guy kind of shook his head up and down, right? [Laughter] Right? And I swear they were, and I don’t know what came over me, I was such an asshole, I was such an asshole to be sitting there as this law student, like I– so then, then she says to me, and by the way I still love this woman, her name is Cathy Dooley, I still love her, I saw her last week I gave her a big hug I mean I love her. She wound up being one of my biggest champions. Then she said to me, “Well you know, if you don’t accept this offer, we don’t know how long we can hold it.” And I looked at her and I said, “I really appreciate the firm is in a difficult position, that they don’t know how to hold, um, how long to hold this.” I said, “From my perspective, um, I’m graduating law school with high honors, I have a masters degree in social work, founding editor in chief of a law journal and a clerkship with the New Jersey Supreme Court. Someone, somewhere will hire me.” And I said, “Thank you very much. I really have to think about it.” I got up and I walked out. Holy moly. All these other lawyers, I went back to my office, they’re like, “Did you get the offer?” I’m like, “Yeah.” They’re like, “Did you take it?” I’m like, “No.” They’re like, “What?!?!?!?” And then like for the rest of the afternoon all these people come running in my office, all these other mid level lawyers are like, “You’re my hero, you’re the shit.” My phone rings, it’s the female partner, she’s like, “Come down to my office.” I’m like, “Alright.” So I go down there, she’s like, “Close the door.” So I close the door, “I just want you to know, my sister’s gay.” I’m like, “Good for her.” I’m like, “good for her.” You know, what do you want, there’s no– so she said, “Alright listen, I know the firm’s been looking into domestic partnership bene– give me some time.” Long story short, over the course of– ‘cause then I went to law school and then I took my clerkship, um, this woman, this straight woman actually went to the partnership at the time and made this law firm that had eight hundred lawyers all over the nation, change their policy to afford domestic partner benefits and I felt like after the firm did that for me, even if it wasn’t for me, and I remember another conversation when she was like, when the partnership was teetering and she called me, I was at my clerkship, and she was like, “Listen, the firm, I’m trying to get them there, but one of the pushbacks I’m getting is not a lot of law firms offer this.” And I said, “Please communicate to the partnership that I agree with them that not many companies are doing this, so that begs the next question, you know, does Drinker, Biddle want to be a leader or a follower?” I’m like, “I don’t care which one it is, like, I’m not telling you you have to do this for me,” but then they eventually did it and so domestic partnership benefits were offered and I felt like– so after law school I felt like I had to go there, how can you not like go there. So I went there and I worked there for two years, I was put on the team that was the national council to Johnson and Johnson there were eleven of us that oversaw a personal injury lawsuit against J&J where there were like a hundred and sixty five thousand people that allegedly died from a specific type of medication, so. That’s how I got to the big firm.
46:23
Then, so I mean the big firm, I feel like there’s a– some sort of shift that has to happen to then start your own.
Yeah, so, um, I am a foster and adoptive parent and in addition, my wife and I, we’ve mentored this, let me backup. When I was at the firm, I was doing pretty well. I was making a lot of money, I was working a lot of hours, I was billing on the most prestigious team, right? I was chosen to be on the associates committee. Out of all the attorneys, they choose four to be the liaison with the partnership. Like I was– all roads were pointing toward success. I was working a million, a bajillion hours a week. In addition, I was always drawn toward family law. There was one partner there that did family law only as a courtesy to the fellow clients. So I knocked on his office, I said, “I’m really interested in family law.” He’s like, “Really?” So I got thrown in, but literally I would get a call on a Tuesday from a partner, he or she would call me down to their office, they would say, “So and so is a fifty million dollar client of the firm. They’re getting divorced. Do it for free, don’t fuck it up, come see me next week.” “Okay.” Like every case I had was like gajillionaires. Like, you know, as part of people’s divorces we were dividing charitable foundations and you know, like, crazy. So, or because they were so wealthy we had to factor into the child support guidelines kidnap insurance because they traveled internationally and their children would be subject to kidnapping. Just crazy, like fighting over do their teenage kids get Porsches or Beemers. So, but I was working, workin, working, and my wife and I, we mentored this one young woman who is now in her mid thirties and when we met her, we were nineteen and she was three, she was the, um, her mom and her grand mom were both pregnant at fourteen, and this kid was three and she’s the oldest of five kids by four different fathers and we had kind of served as a mentor to her. And she eventually grew to be the first person in her family to go to coll– graduate high school, the first person in her family to go to college, first– she’s a homeowner, now she’s doing really, really well. But when she was a freshman in college, and we were just happy to get her graduating and into college, and she was going to Rutgers on an almost full academic scholarship so it was a random Monday night? I was at my office, it was like eleven o’clock at night and this young woman called me, her name is Victoria, Tori called me and she’s like, “What are you doing? I have something really important to talk to you about.” Now given this young woman’s trajectory at the time, I was like, “Uh-oh. Is she dropping out, is she pregnant? What’s going on?” ‘Cause there was a lot of– a lot of difficulties, and I’m like, “What is it?” And she’s like, “ You know when I met you and Linda, you guys, I was little and you guys were so poor, you used to take me to Carvel and you didn’t have enough money so I had to choose between either two scoops of ice cream or one scoop of ice cream and sprinkles.” And I was like, “This is why you called me? What are you doing?” And she’s like, “I loved you then, what are you doing?” And I was like, “I gotta go.” And I hung up the phone, I sat back and I looked at the piles of my paper and the, you know, and I was like, she should be out getting drunk and screwing frat boys, she should not be calling me. So less than thirty days later, I gave notice, I started this gig, um, now have, running a multi-million dollar law firm as a managing partner and here I am. So, yeah.
With all of–
Now doing family law. That’s all I do. We do things other than family law, but that’s all I do is family law.
So I guess my question is, when you start, when you start your own firm, did you start off being like, this is going to be the ethos of this place? Did you have an understanding of that or did you, how do you approach what kind of law or what kind of client you’re setting out to serve?
So I knew I wanted it to be different, I knew I wanted it to be different, but I couldn’t quantify how. To the big firm’s credit a lot of those partners sent their clients with me and said, “Terry’s going on her own, she is really good, you should go with her.” I actually brought some clients with me to do matrimonial and family here. It’s how I helped pay the bills a little while. Um, I knew I had a master’s degree in social work, I wanted it to feel different, I wanted it to be different. I think lawyers think too much and social workers feel too much and if you can combine it, you know, I wanted it to be different. So, I’m in a suit today but most of the time you probably walking around you probably see some lawyers in sweatpants, we are a law firm that is no dress code. Every lawyer here does more free and pro bono law than is required by licensure, um, we currently are doing a brief for free on behalf of the National Association of Social Workers up in the New Jersey Supreme Court, we, um, it’s a different place. You may have also noticed there is candy in every room, there is beer in the fridge, there’s toys in the waiting room. How many law firms do you go to that there’s toys in the waiting room for kids? I don’t know any. Or a giant Connect 4 you probably saw as you walked by. I’m trying to find lawyers that are human. I think that I described going to law school as The Wizard of Oz, you leave Kansas, you go to Oz, it’s crazy, bat shit crazy, and you know eventually Dorothy goes back to Kansas, but I think many lawyers don’t remember to go back to Kansas. So, um, you know law school teaches us a way to think and act that makes us not really human in many ways, so um.
Do you have– is there– how do you connect, I mean I think you kind of sort of just answered this, but maybe it’s just another way of me asking, it’s like how do you connect what your own personal lived experience is over your life and maybe what– what sorts of things have had to be, you know, we can– there’s even this project has a pretty progressive agenda in quotes if you want to call it that, if you want to call highlighting or giving space to a story that is frequently disenfranchised an agenda, um, how do you see your work kind of fitting into that?
So, I think I have, I think I have three types of work and how that fits in. One is my role as an entrepreneur, the other is my role as a lawyer, and the other is my role as a supervisor of other lawyers. So let’s talk about as an entrepreneur. I’ll tell you a story. When I tell you I know first hand what it means to be disenfranchised– so one of the things, because– because this law firm tries to be human first and lawyers second, we have a lot of wonderful things, like there is unlimited paid time off, there is all kinds of crazy stuff and a while ago we started health savings accounts for all the employees. Where I as the owner was putting money in all of my employees’ health savings accounts. And I remember I was working late one night and I got an email from my health insurance broker saying, “Terry, give me a buzz.” So I called him, and he’s like, “I have bad news for you.” I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “You know all the money that you’re putting in for your family, um, you can’t get a tax deduction for.” And I’m like, “What?” ‘Cause this is before federal law had recognized marriage. I’m like, “What?” He’s like, “Yeah because Linda, I know she’s your wife, you call her your wife, but she’s really, under federal law, she’s a legal stranger.” I’m like, “Let me get this right, I can work here, I can deny myself my own salary, I can pay myself two hundred and fifty dollars every two weeks, I can pay myself a hundred and twenty five dollars a week for three years to start this place, take out a loan against my personal home to make sure that every single employee’s salary is met, then pay thousands of dollars for all of my employees to get this tax benefit for them and their families, but I cannot take advantage of that because under federal law Linda is not my wife?” He’s like, “That’s what I’m telling you.” I’m like, “Thank you for this very productive conversation.” So time and time and time again there was just many. So as an entrepreneur really feeling that literally in my gut, but also as an entrepreneur demanding equality, I make the male attorneys take paternity time off, as long as they want. Right? Mommy, Daddy, I don’t care, there’s a new baby around? Boys, you better go spend time with that baby, if for no other reason, it will make your wife like you more. Um, so that, as an entrepreneur, I know what it’s like to get hit and I try, I try to make things as equal as I can from an entrepreneurial perspective. Lawyering, I actually had a trial myself, I was lawyering in court the day that the United States Supreme Court decision came down for marriage equality. And I remember at the time, the judge that I was in front of, she herself, pretty liberal, liberal judge herself. At the time, I think she was the presiding judge of the family part and, um, that morning, we knew the decision was coming down, she called the attorneys in chambers and she’s like, “Listen, I told my law clerk that the minute that the Supreme Court decision comes down, I want him to interrupt me. Is that okay with you counsel?” I’m like, “Absolutely, judge.” You know the judge knew that I was a member of the gay and lesbian community. She’s like, “Okay.” So I want to say it was like midway through the morning and I see the judge’s law clerk come out and hand the judge a little scrap of paper and I see the judge fall back in her chair and her face was, like, so happy and this sense of relief and she said, “We won.” And the fact that she said “We won” ‘cause, you know, straight, mar– and I literally, I felt this instant sense of emotion, my eyes welled up and I stood up and I said, “With permission of the court, may I have a five minute break?” And she looked at me and she smiled, and she said, “Absolutely counsel.” So I stepped out and I called my wife and it was just– to be in court the moment that that happened, that was interesting as well. So there are moments where I really see the judiciary working toward progress and then there’s other moments where I don’t. So, for example, this is about the trans community, so let me get to that. I see, I really do see notions of gender and gender identity as being one of the last bastions of the law to catch up. I think in many ways it’s easier for people and the law to tolerate same sex relationships because that’s about who you love, right? It doesn’t matter who you love. Who’s against love? I think the reason why the law and society is having such a hard time catching up with the gender, trans issues is because that’s about who we are. And it’s very hard to object to who people love. Love is love, love is wonderful, it’s a lot easier to lay blame and regulate who people are. So I think that’s part of what’s going on, but, um, a lot of legal issues that people face, stupid things like, you know, making sure that your driver’s license, you know, which is one of your primary documents, comports with your passport. That comports with your social security number. We’ve had custody cases where a parent starts as one gender and ends as another and our custody statute in New Jersey is gender neutral, it’s not supposed to favor mommies over daddies or daddies over mommies, what do you do when someone starts as a daddy and now they’re a mommy or someone starts as a mommy and now they’re a daddy? And I think here is the difficulty that I and I think this law firm faces in trying to be lawyers and humans; again we talk about the fact that the purpose of law is to prevent anarchy, so when you have something as gender or sexuality which is, which we’re now asking for it to be liberated and not so archaic, it’s natural that there’s going to be that tension. On the one hand as attorneys, we are advocating and we are saying, “Look these litigants should be treated no differently. They should be treated no differently when it comes to issues of their custody and parenting time, they should be treated no differently in their earning capacities, they should be treated no differently in their access to medical care. At the same time, however, even as someone who is a champion of these causes in the legal system, I don’t think I would be an honest human if I didn’t recognize that the transition of gender does impact custody and parent time, does impact people’s earning capacities, does impact their medical issue. So look, we know that statistically women earn less than men, so a man who transitions to a woman, should there be alimony considerations that probably going forward that now woman may not earn as much as they would have as a man, and is that a voluntary decrease in employability on that person’s part? Um, if I am a parent of adolescent kids, and adolescents are already weirded out by anything their parents do, should parenting time always– look, if– if– if I am a woman and I am transitioning to a man and I have a fourteen year old son at home, and that fourteen year old boy is weirded out and doesn’t necessarily want me around, how much parenting time should be forced because legally, as a parent, I can assert that right, am I going to do more long term damage to my custodial relationship than if I just back off and give my teenage boy time to grow into maturity? So I think that, on the one hand, legal professionals have to be zealous and have to advocate for pure equality under the law. In a practical perspective, in addition to that, lawyers as counselors have a duty to be pragmatic problem solvers for the other consequences that flow there from, if that makes any sense.
63:17
How, and I would say that my follow up is how do you, like, how do you create the conversation within the law firm to sort that out, to try to sort out, you know, what is the tack we take when dealing with– are you– do you find yourselves in the position of in essence helping articulate for your client, whoever your client is, whichever side of the equation they’re on, um, what is the best tack for them to take, right? So how do you find yourselves as legal professionals talking with each other about, what does this all mean?
So I’ll give you a perfect example. We had a case recently where someone was transitioning from one gender to another and they were in the middle of a custody battle, and we knew that the judge was an older, more conservative male. And the client was at the point of their transition where they wanted to start dressing like the gender they were transitioning to and we had to have a conversation with the client where we said to them, “Listen, if we were sitting at a bar with you and throwing back a beer, we would say sing it sister or way to go brother, you wear whatever you want. That said, you pay us for us to tell you the rules of the game and a good lawyer knows the law, a great lawyer knows the judge, and we’re telling you, you can wear whatever you want,” we always put this in an email, too, so we cover ourselves. Every good lawyer, you may not be aware of this, I don’t know how many lawyers you’ve interviewed, but every good lawyer has within every case file, a little pencil file called CYA where they bestow advice on the client and the client can take it or leave it, but whatever advice that you give, it’s in there so that the client does something stupid you can be like, “I told you so.” We say, “Listen, you can wear whatever you want to court, if it is that important to you to speak your truth. Speak it however you want. We are simply telling you that we would not be responsible attorneys if we did not warn you that wearing this to court at this juncture may hurt you. We’re not saying it’s right, we’re not saying it’s fair, we’re simply reflecting to you the reality of the situation.” So, but you know, here’s what’s so funny, here’s what’s so crazy, as horrible, as offensive, as upsetting as that may sound, if a wife was asking for a lot of alimony, I would tell her, “Don’t wear your big diamond rings to court.” So it’s not, we forget that the law is made up of humans. It’s a reflection of humanity. So, yeah.
Um, do you find– what do you think is the– I mean I guess that is one very specific story of what is the struggle or what is the issue that you’re wrestling with now. Do you kind of see in advance where the next layer of conversation has to go?
Well look, the– when people are in court, people go to court to seek the redress of wrongs. And, as a general notion, right and wrong are supposed to be these black and white things. When you simultaneously overlay a process that is designed for the redress of wrongs with constituents themselves who are living in a period of gray, I could think of a hundred ways in which there are questions to answer. Health insurance, right? You know whether you’re in an employment case, a divorce case, a car accident case, and there’s issues of insurance coverage for what? I mean here’s a question: so let’s say I’m transitioning from male to female and as part of that I get breast implants. Then I’m in a terrible car accident and I’m suing the other insurance company as part of that. I have to get my– one of my breasts reconstructed because there was an injury there. Shouldn’t your insurance really pay for that? I don’t know. I don’t think the law’s decided that yet. I mean, you know, again, because the redress of the wrong that would typically be done in court doesn’t match the fluidity of where the constituent is. So, law is one of the few professions where we simultaneously are expected to apply what is the rule while simultaneously seeking to change those rules. And, uh, I don’t– we don’t have it figured out yet.
Do you have any, I just want to be cognizant of time, we’re basically done, a little over an hour.
Sorry I’m talking too much.
No! That’s kind of the goal. Do you have any familiarity with or understanding of the Babs Siperstein Laws?
No. Teach me.
So, it’s the new series of laws that were signed very early on, they were being debated and pushed through the legislature at the end of Chris Christie’s administration and then were signed into law, which is all, a lot of it has to do with statewide– Babs Siperstein was a New Jersey resident who was a very active voice in transgender rights. She was the first transgender person to be appointed to the Democratic National Committee, she was like, kind of–
Someone I should know– okay
So the series of laws are named after her–
Got it.
Um– I think they were actually signed into law a day or two before she passed away. The laws have to do with legal identification.
Got it.
It’s all the laws that are now– allow you to change your birth certificate.
Right, I’ve been dealing with the applications of that, yes, okay.
Right, it was the package of laws that kind of bundled everything together and said in the state of New Jersey you have the legal right to change the gender marker on your birth certificate, um–
Which then makes passport and driver’s license and everything else.
Right, right.
Although interestingly, passports are governed by federal law.
Right. Which is also–
Because New Jersey state law says that your birth certificate can be changed by gender, does the United States government have to recognize that? I don’t think that’s been adjudicated yet.
Which in some ways in my layman’s perspective follows that similar thing when half of the states have marriage equality, and the other half don’t, then suddenly you’ve got discrimination across–
Generally what happens in the development of humanity is that the states lead the federal government. So in 1976 it was still against the law for black people to marry white people, it was 1976. It was the case of Loving versus Virginia. It was an African American woman and a white man who lived in Virginia. They went across the border to D.C., got married, and then came back to Virginia. The same notion of marriage equality. When more states started doing it, then people were moving between states, we had a lot of people, we had people before marriage equality on the federal level, we had people that got married in a state, they’d come here to New Jersey, they couldn’t get divorced here, ‘cause New Jersey didn’t recognize it yet, they couldn’t get divorced in their home state ‘cause they no longer lived there, there were people in limbo. I think the same thing is going to happen with this notion of gender fluidity and gender equality. I think it’s going to take a number of states, usually it takes a generation, it usually takes a number of states stepping up and then it usually takes a number of lawyers and litigators– see everyone hates lawyers until you need one. Right? It actually is lawyers that are on the front. Someone has to litigate these cases. Right? And so, the first person who goes to National Security and wants to change their passport based on their new gender on their birth certificate and is denied that opportunity, somebody’s going to litigate that in federal court. That’s going to be a lawyer. Right? It’s not going to be a doctor, it’s not going to be a social worker, it’s not going to be a teacher, it’s not going to be some other advocate person. It’s actually going to be a lawyer. And there’s going to be some lawyer that’s going to stick out his or her reputational neck on that endeavor, so my advice to any– I have two advices for any subset of humanity that wants to be recognized fully. Number one: make nice with lawyers because they are the people that advocate to get the laws changed. Number two: make nice with the majority. Black people were not freed as slaves until enough white people thought it was a good idea, women did not get the right to vote until enough men thought it was a good idea. Gay people didn’t get to be married until enough straight people thought it was a good idea. So, um, I hate to have these harsh– this sounds harsh and horrible, but for my trans friends, I would advise besides fighting like hell, besides fighting and dying and everything else they’re already doing, the recipe for success is number one: make nice with smart lawyers that are willing to litigate and number two: make nice with the majority, because when enough non-gender fluid people think you’re entitled to rights, that’s when you’re going to get it and not before and that’s horrible. It’s horrible to say, but that’s the way humanity has progressed.
Have you had any experience or circumstances dealing with public educational systems? Families who are perhaps wrestling with policy?
So yeah, as part of our practice here– so here at our firm, we do matrimonial and family, we do wills, trusts and estates, we do real estate, we do a lot of special ed stuff as well, we have a lawyer here that does– and it’s interesting, whether these children that are grappling with gender identity issues, are they entitled to the special ed classification and all the accommodations that other children are. Another– another dilemma that we see legally happening is children who are under the age of puberty who are starting to identify as one gender or another, what rights do their parents have to either afford them or deny them some of the hormone treatments that defer their puberty and I’m really, I’m really torn on that. On the one hand, if people are identifying as trans they should be able to speak on their behalf sooner rather than later, on the other hand, if I had a twelve year old that was not saying they were a trans but wanted to be something else, would I– would I give any twelve year old carte blanche access to any type of medical treatment? I don’t know that I would, right? And so it’s a really difficult legal problem as well and I’ll be curious to see whether– we have seen cases where people that are under the age of eighteen seek their own emancipation to be liberated from their parents to be able to get access to those things, so, um, you would be happy to know that the New Jersey Bar Association now, the New Jersey Bar Association, every lawyer pays dues and we have an educational center that’s right off the Rutgers campus, um, and at the legal educational center, which can hold easily five hundred lawyers at a time for seminars, more than that, um, now has gender neutral bathrooms, so I thought that was pretty cool, that now at least the Bar Association has gender neutral bathrooms. But yes, school districts are grappling with this as well and, you know, I feel bad for schools. They are asked to deal with a lot of issues and I don’t know that they’re getting the proper funding to deal with it. I don’t know that they’re getting the proper funding or training to deal with this.
Or guidance from the state level.
Correct. No guidance, no funding, no training, so I don’t blame schools for getting this wrong.
Is there anything– is there any question that I haven’t asked that you thought, “You should ask this question.” I think that’s a really great weigh in, you’re kind of the first voice that we’ve had on the legal side of matters to try to help us frame that conversation, so I thank you for that.
You’re welcome. I will tell you this, where I envision the next fight to go– is United States Law has this notion of equal protection under the law, and equal protection first was used with regard to slavery and African Americans, then it was used for women voting, then used in the equality, I think that also provides the legal framework where there’s most likely to be the highest amount of success in the legal world if litigation and advocacy could happen in that equal protection framework, because it’s something that’s already resonated with courts in the past, and so I think it’ll be an easier leap for the courts and the legislatures to enact. So–
Great, I think that’s a great parting thought. If you’re good, I can stop the recorder here.
I’m done.
Brilliant.