Law360’s Hannah Albarazi writes about a very personal interview with retired Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye. The article starts by saying the former Chief “broke through barriers on her rise to the top of the Golden State’s judiciary, but as a law student she endured a haunting experience that would shape her legal career.”

The experience was a crude and deceptive solicitation (an understatement) by an attorney during a Cantil-Sakauye summer clerkship at a Bay Area law firm. She said to the reporter, “I think you’re the third person I’ve ever told” about the incident.

Cantil-Sakauye also related the less reprehensible, but still unmistakable, sexism she encountered at every stage of her legal career, from attorney to judging at all three levels of the judiciary, as well as heading the judicial branch as chair of the Judicial Council. For example, she would be ignored by judges when she was a lawyer, interrupted by lawyers when she was a judge and, even when she ascended to the top position of one of California’s three branches of government, “there were some groups of judges who refused to call me the chief, so they called me ‘the lady.’ ”

As Chief Justice, she said, “I ordered that [implicit bias] be taught to all judges, knowing full well I cannot order judges to do anything because I’m not their boss. I basically dared them to say that they objected to me ordering them, and they didn’t object.”

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