Maria Marcus, a law professor as a public interest attorney defending civil rights in the South and having successfully argued six cases before the United States Supreme Court representing the State of New York, in a case of winning unemployment benefits for striking workers, died on April 27 in her. house in Manhattan. She is 88 years old.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter Valerie Marcus.
Professor Marcus has argued the cases before the Supreme Court on behalf of the New York attorney general. She was assistant attorney general from 1967 to 1978 and chief of the office’s litigation department from 1976 to 1978.
In early 1979, the court agreed, From 6 to 3, in Telephone New York v. New York State Department of Labor, that the state is empowered to require companies to pay unemployment benefits to striking workers. (Professor Marcus argued for this in 1978.)
The judges rejected the phone company’s argument that because the tacit law prioritizes labor over management, it must yield to federal labor laws that call for government neutrality. In its decision, the court upheld the appellate court’s decision that although the law placed the state on the side of labor during the strike, Congress did not impose a uniform national policy on subsidies. grant unemployment to the strikers, which is left to the states to decide.
According to the High Court Historical Society, of the 160 women who have argued in court since 1880, only eight have appeared more frequently than Professor Marcus. She was ranked 9th along with five lawyers, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as the most controversial woman in court from 1880 to 1980.
She taught at Fordham College of Law from 1978 until her retirement in 2011. She is the second woman to become a full professor here.
Professor Marcus has moderated Fordham’s award-winning debate court program for 42 years. In 1995, a team of hers won the National Moot Court Competition sponsored by the New York City Bar Association and the American College of Trial Bars.
She is credited with writing one of the earliest legal critiques of domestic violence, “Military Violence: The Law of Force and the Power of the Law,” in 1981.
Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn, who served as a co-adviser on unemployment benefits before the Supreme Court, described Professor Marcus in a phone interview as a “competitor” strict chanter, a perfectionist, but an extremely patient mentor.”
Matthew Diller, dean of Fordham Law School, wrote in an email that “her main legacy is in the generations of students she has taught – emphasizing the values of integrity, clarity and accuracy and a sense of joy in the wisdom of rational argument that is the best measure of the law. “
Maria Eleanor Erica Lenhoff was born on June 23, 1933, in Vienna. Her father, Arthur Lenhoff, was a judge of the Constitutional Court of Austria, the nation’s highest court. Her mother, Clara (Gruber) Lenhoff, is a homemaker.
On the day Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, the family fled, first to Switzerland, then to England, and finally to the United States. Her father, a Jew, was on the Gestapo’s most wanted list because of his legal rulings demanding religious equality in universities – decisions that Professor Marcus would later liken in an article, in an article about American citizenship is “Austria Prewar Brown Board of Education.”
“Drawing from this experience, she has a profound sense of the importance of justice and the rule of law,” said William M. Treanor, principal and executive vice president of the Georgetown University Law Center. “I learned a lot from her work, combining her extraordinary erudition with her commitment to the law as a motivator for good.”
Professor Marcus earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1954 and graduated in 1957 from Yale Law School. There, she met and married Norman Marcus, who became general counsel to the New York City Planning Commission. He died in 2008.
In addition to her daughter Valerie, vice president of legal affairs at RCA Records, she is survived by two other children, Nicole and Eric Marcus, and six grandchildren.
Professor Marcus served as deputy counsel for the NAACP’s national office from 1961 to 1967 and litigated important civil rights cases in the South. She collaborated with Robert L. Cartergeneral counsel and Medgar Evers, NAACP leader in Mississippi.
She was vice president of the New York City Bar Association from 1995 to 1996 and in 1973 headed a committee of the association that recommended that the City Council pass legislation for distinguish bars on the basis of sexual orientation.
Professor Marcus, colleagues say, has an uncanny knack for remembering the names and faces of her students on the first day of class. After her retirement, she continued to run Fordham Law’s Moot Court Board for another decade.
Professor James Kainen recalled in a Fordham obituary that her performance would have been frequently lamented by Bishop Joseph A. O’Hareformer chairman of Fordham.
“Every year during his tenure,” Professor Kainen said, “President O’Hare would come to a meeting of our faculty and never fail to complain that he couldn’t hire a trainer. football player who will be filing close to Maria’s controversial court team. ”
