While I'm on Vacation I thought I'd Share an Article

Dorothy Wright Nelson 
The Baha'i religion has guided Judge Dorothy Nelson, an early proponent of mediation. 

Dorothy Wright Nelson, Senior Circuit Judge, 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals

Career highlights: Assumed senior status, 1995; appointed by President Jimmy Carter, 1979; faculty member and dean, University of Southern California Law School, 1957 to 1980; private practice, Los Angeles, 1954-1957.  Law school: UCLA School of Law, 1953

Age: 83 

By John Roemer, Daily Journal

Senior Circuit Judge Dorothy Wright Nelson found her life's path in 1950 when a law school fraternity rejected membership applications she and some minority classmates at UCLA School of Law had submitted.

"No women, no blacks," was the edict from the Phi Delta Phi headquarters back east, Nelson recalled. That led the UCLA chapter's president, Donald M. Barrett, who strongly opposed racism and sexism, to devise a radical solution in which he and all other existing members on the UCLA campus resigned and invited the excluded students to help form a new group, the UCLA Law Society.

Impressed, Nelson asked Barrett what led him to do it. She learned he'd been studying the Baha'i faith, a religion developed in Persia, now Iran, in the 19th Century, which teaches the spiritual unity of mankind. "Especially important were the golden rule, the peaceful resolution of conflict and the absolute equality of men and women," said Nelson, who had been raised an Episcopalian. "So of course my classmates and I were drawn to that and to Don."

Barrett has since died after a career as a prominent attorney and as the secretary general of the Baha'i international community.

"In class, we'd watch Don like a hawk to see how he dealt with issues that came up," Nelson said. "An inner energy came from him. And that one righteous act of his ended up inspiring 17 of us in a class of 72 to become Baha'i."

That included Dorothy Wright's future husband, James Nelson, who went on to become a Los Angeles Municipal Court judge. He died a year ago.

Dorothy Nelson, now 83, applied her new religion to the world of law to employ its conflict resolution principle in what was - in the 1950s - the revolutionary concept of mediation.

'Especially important were the golden rule, the peaceful resolution of conflict and the absolute equality of men and women.' - Dorothy Wright Nelson

As the first female law professor at the University of Southern California, she included mediation in her teaching, beginning in 1957. Fellow professors were underwhelmed. "What is Dorothy teaching? It's not law," she overheard. "It's a woman's thing, bringing everyone together to resolve differences," people said skeptically.  Nelson persevered. She became USC Law School dean, the first woman dean at any accredited law school in the U.S. That put her in a stronger position to promote mediation, as it became a major life calling.

Today she's a judge with an aversion to litigation. She approvingly quoted the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger on the adversarial system: "Too costly, too painful, too destructive, too inefficient for a truly civilized people."

Even so, there are some cases in which Nelson deems litigation as necessary. For instance, in a potential class action over the collision avoidance system in Acura cars, she dissented when her colleagues reversed class certification.  Donald M. Falk, a Mayer Brown LLP partner representing Acura, said that Nelson was a powerful force on the bench. "She was essentially running the show" at the oral argument, Falk said. "She gave the parties room to make their arguments, and it was a pleasure to appear before her. She asks demanding questions, but she's not combative."

Nelson said she has learned to look more deeply into how conflicts become cases. "Often when people sue there are underlying turmoils that are not always what they actually sue for. And people emerge much happier when they come up with their own solution" through mediation.

In 1970, Nelson provoked a furor by flunking seven of USC's first 20 black law students. "I was defining the policy of the school," she said. She phoned Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall, the U.S. Supreme Court's first black justice, for advice. She had come to know Marshall through his wife Cecilia "Sissy" Marshall, who'd attended a Baha'i school in Hawaii.

"Because of that connection, I had Justice Marshall out for moot court several times. He told me, 'Do not have a black degree and a white degree. Make sure all the students meet the same high standards.'"  Fortunately, Nelson said, she was able to place the dismissed students at other law schools in the region.

Her ideas as a law school dean about setting up a merits system for selecting federal judges led her to write presidential candidates Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford asking whether they would endorse such a plan. After Carter was sworn in in 1977, his attorney general Griffin B. Bell invited Nelson to the Department of Justice to discuss her suggestion.  She impressed Bell and his boss enough that Carter appointed her to the 9th Circuit. "He was looking for women and minorities," Nelson said.

At first she said she hesitated, until her husband told her, "Do it. You've been criticizing judges all your academic life. See what it's like."

She is part of a liberal cohort of Carter appointees that includes Joseph Jerome Ferris, who is black, plus Betty Binns Fletcher, Mary M. Schroeder, Harry Pregerson and Stephen R. Reinhardt. Others, now deceased, are Cecil F. Poole, who was black, Thomas Tang and Robert Boochever.

When Nelson reached the court in 1979, she immediately approached then-Chief Judge James R. Browning about setting up a mediation program. Browning was open to giving it a try. He converted a law clerk's position to that of a trained mediator.  "Today we have nine full time mediators with a success rate as high as 85 percent," Nelson said.

Chief Judge Alex Kozinski said the court has come to value Nelson's efforts greatly. "Judge Nelson's gentle but relentless campaign to educate us about the advantages of mediation has made all of us much more sensitive to the possibility of resolving cases by amicable means," he wrote in an email.  

"It's a rare calendar nowadays where the possibility of settlement isn't discussed with the parties in one or more cases. Many cases never reach us at all because they are resolved by our mediation office or by private settlement talks."

The circuit's mediators settle about 1,000 cases each year, court officials said, usually early in the case before briefing or motions have been required. Each appellate mediator saves the cost of three appellate judges, one survey found.

Nelson said she ultimately decided to be a judge for two reasons. One was to promote the mediation movement. Nelson helped by founding the Western Justice Center, which promotes alternative dispute resolution and is housed in a building next door to the Pasadena federal courthouse where she keeps chambers.

Nelson's second reason was that her place on the federal bench lets her aid fellow Baha'is, many of whom are persecuted for their faith in Middle Eastern countries, she said. "I get a level of respect so that when I hear about those things I can sometimes do something," she said.  Nelson travels extensively, often giving lectures on mediation that lead to friendships with authorities well placed to later hear her pleas for help for threatened Baha'is, she said.

Once in New York for a seminar at Columbia Law School, she met a chief prosecutor of a Middle Eastern country she declined to name. The man was gruff and dismissive, she said, but she slowly won over him and his wife by speaking of Baha'is' admiration and reverence for the Koran.

A few days after the couple returned home, a number of Baha'is were released from jail in the prosecutor's country. And Nelson got a note, she said, that read, "Dear Judge Dorothy, I hope this makes you happy."

"I often can find a listening ear," Nelson said. "I work undercover."