Dean of Harvard Law School Erwin N. Griswold hosted the 16 women admitted to the Class of 1963 in his home in the fall of 1960. Over tea, he welcomed them and expressed excitement in having the women represented in the class he had helped pick.
“But I can’t for the life of me figure out what you’ll be doing when you graduate,” one of the female students, Siegrun Dinklage Kane, remembered him saying, referencing the male-dominated law profession.
Janet Reno was one of the students in Griswold’s study that day, a member of the Law School Class of 1963. In less than three decades, Reno would become the most powerful attorney in the nation, serving as former President Bill Clinton’s Attorney General for seven years.
Reno, who cites Griswold and her Harvard professors as inspiration and mentors in her legal career, graduated near the top of her class three years after the tea in the dean’s house. Friends and classmates say that the intellect, grounded nature, and drive which defined Reno’s career in public service began long before she entered the workforce.
STANDING TALL
Remembering her first day of law school, Reno said in an interview with the New York Times in 1994, “I don’t think I’ve ever felt so lost as I did then,”
That week, in the first day of a torts class, Michael S. Yesley ’63 remembers that the professor—who employed a “traditional mode” of pedagogy—called on Reno.
“[The professor] called on [Reno] first to recite a case and then answer questions about it using the usual Socratic method of the Law School,” Yesley says. “He gave her a real hard time, but she was very matter of fact and held up under the barrage of questions.”
But Reno was used to questioning and debate. Born in Miami in July 1938 as the daughter of two investigative reporters, Reno was a debate champion and valedictorian of her high school. She majored in chemistry at Cornell and served as the president of the Women’s Self-Government Association. Immediately following her graduation in 1960, she enrolled at the Law School.
As a student at the Law School, Reno lived off campus, spending one year with a professor and his family, according to Paul Anderson’s biography of Reno. She was “known to take long, solitary walks through historic neighborhoods and cemeteries,” Anderson wrote.
Reno commented for the biography that a talk she attended at Memorial Hall given by Eleanor Roosevelt would stay with her “as love as I live.”
Reno’s presence at the Law School was remembered by many of classmates, whether they had classes with her or not. Standing at 6’1” “she was tall…so she definitely stood out,” Neil L. Chayet, former classmate of Reno’s, said.
BEYOND LADIES’ DAY
When Reno was a student at the Law School, there was only one women’s bathroom on the campus, found in the basement of Austin Hall. Professor W. Barton Leach ’21, who joined the Law School faculty in 1929, did not allow women to speak in class, saying their voices “were not powerful enough to be heard,” according to Charles Nesson, a former classmate of Reno’s, quoted in Anderson’s biography.
Instead, Reno’s classmate Siegrun Dinklage Kane said, Leach had an annual “Ladies’ Day.”
