Bessie Margolin was not born to privilege; she was left at the Jewish Orphans Home of New Orleans at four. She was fortunate to have a foundational education at the Newman School. She was admitted to Tulane Law School, the only woman in her class, and graduated with a liberal arts degree and a law degree, with honors, in 1930. The strong recommendations that she had from Tulane got her admitted to Yale Law School, where she worked as a research assistant and earned the Sterling Fellowship, the first woman to be awarded that honor. She graduated from Yale with a J.S.D. in May 1933. She immediately began working as a researcher for the Inter-American Commission of Women, mainly writing and conducting her research at the Library of Congress during that summer. (Trestman, 38.)
Her first permanent post-degree position was at the new agency, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), at a time when women formed only 2% of the legal profession. (Trestman, 41.) While at the TVA, where again she was the first female lawyer, she worked on several key cases, including a few that challenged the TVA’s existence, such as Ashwander v. Tennessee Valley Authority (1936). She went on to work at the U.S. Department of Labor in March 1939 as an advocate for various labor issues. At the Department of Labor, she served as associate labor solicitor, where she became an expert at the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. It is worth mentioning that Margolin joined the department when it was led by Frances Perkins.
In March 1945, Margolin—as only the 25th woman ever to argue at the Supreme Court—argued and won her first Supreme Court case. She went on to win 25 of 27 cases that she argued before the court. In 1946, she was loaned to the U.S. Army for six months to draft the rules for trying Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. During her career at Labor, she “passionately and tenaciously enforced the minimum wage and overtime protections of the Fair Labor Standards Act and later the Equal Pay Act.” She directed the preparation of some 600 Supreme Court and appellate briefs and won eight out of ten of her cases. She argued the first cases of the Equal Pay Act and was a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Her most influential case was Shultz v. Wheaton Glass Company (1970), which has been compared to Brown v. Board of Education in terms of its importance to U.S. labor law.
She left the federal service as the Associate Solicitor General of the Department of Labor in 1972. Retired Chief Justice Earl Warren spoke at her retirement dinner. In his remarks, Warren noted, “[t]he Fair Labor Standards Act was not always popular in all quarters, and the flesh and sinews that were developed around its bare bones were her great contribution to millions of American working people. Many of these people do not know who Bessie Margolin is, but if they did know, they would praise her… In their name, I would like to thank her tonight… [Margolin] has been a great public servant.” (Trestman, 165.)
Sources
- KF373.M292 T74 2016 Trestman, Marlene. Fair Labor Lawyer: the Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin.
- Tani, Karen M. “Portia’s Deal.” Chicago-Kent Law Review 87, no. 2 (January 2012): 549–70. Accessed March 3, 2025.
- KF26 .L3 1963e United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Equal Pay Act of 1963.
- Earl Warren papers, box 832, Remarks, Dinner Marking Retirement of Bessie Margolin, Washington Hilton Hotel, January 28, 1972.
- JK671.C52 Civil Service Journal.
- KF3306 2016 The Employment Law Sourcebook / Eleanor L. Grossman, J.D., and Robert B. McKinney, J.D., of the staff of the National Legal Research Group, Inc., editors.
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