had earned a law degree. He
passed the bar exam, but it was
in the midst of the Depression,
and when he hung out his shin-
gle, no one showed up. So he
asked himself 'what is a Jewish
guy doing in a business like this?'
and went into the wholesale fur
business, which he always de-
spised . . . At one point he sup-
plied all the Dayton Stores in
Minneapolis and St. Paul."
Was her father's aborted law
career a factor in her decision to
become a lawyer?
Friedman says it was. "My fa-
ther told me, 'You should go to
law school. You think like a
lawyer.' But I said to him only
boys can be lawyers."
Friedman was married during
her first year in law school. Her
former husband, David, is a pro-
fessor of microbiology at the Uni-
versity of Michigan Medical
School. They have two sons,
Daniel and Jonathan.
After graduation, the couple
lived in Lafayette, Ind., where
Friedman taught business law
at Purdue. She left for a year to
take care of her mother in St.
Paul who was dying of cancer.
Her father died when Friedman
was 19. "I often wish he could see
me now," she says.
During the Vietnam war,
Friedman's husband was draft-
ed and stationed at Walter Reed
Hospital in Washington. At that
time, law firms were generally
not allowing women to go into the
courtroom, so Friedman took a
job with the federal Justice De-
partment. She worked at DOJ
from 1966 through 1969 as a tri-
al lawyer hi the civil division un-
der attorney generals Nicholas
Katzenbach and Ramsey Clark.
Her highest profile case was
the one involving Marina Oswald
Porter, the widow of Lee Harvey
Oswald, the alleged assassin of
John F. Kennedy, who unsuc-
cessfully sued the federal gov-
ernment for the return of
confiscated property belonging to
her husband.
Friedman left the DOJ in Jan.
1969 at the change of adminis-
trations. Almost immediately,
she was hired as staff counsel for
the first federal Obscenity Com-
mission by its chairman, Bill
Lockhart, her former law school
dean. Friedman stayed with the
commission until 1970 when she
and her husband moved to Michi-
gan. She joined Wayne State in
September 1971.
Although she was teaching
contract law, It was through her
course in constitutional law that
Friedman first encountered Myra
Bradwell. "In the casebook I was
using, there was no material on
gender discrimination, so I was
putting together my own mater-
ial on it," recalls Friedman. "One
of my colleagues, Edward Wise,
the legal historian, told me I had
to take a look at a 1873 United
HISTORY page 20
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