This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
It was March 1945. Bessie Margolin, a Labor Department lawyer helping to defend New Deal reforms, stood before the United States Supreme Court to argue her first case. She was by all measures an oddity in those hallowed chambers: a woman in a predominantly male legal world, a Jew whose presence in pedigreed institutions was often scowled at, and a newcomer with an unconventional upbringing (she grew up in a Southern orphanage, and her first job involved peddling encyclopedias in Baton Rouge).
Opposite her was the patrician Joseph B. Ely, a former Massachusetts governor whose political roots ran nine generations deep. He had a preacher’s voice that lifted crowds to their feet at political rallies. And though he was a Democrat like Franklin D. Roosevelt, he hated the president’s efforts to enact wide-reaching economic, social and political reforms. A year earlier, he had tried to block Roosevelt’s nomination for an unprecedented fourth term as a way to curb his party’s leftward drift.
Now, as counsel to big industry, Ely was aiming to throttle a New Deal law known as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which gave the country a 40-hour workweek and a minimum wage and banned forms of child labor that were considered too dangerous for the underaged to handle. (The law was amended in 1963 to also protect against wage discrimination based on gender.)
Though Margolin was a neophyte to that political veteran, she unfurled all that she had in court: her wit, her silver tongue and her first-class ability to unknot legal complexities.
She won.
The court’s ruling in the case, Phillips, Inc. v. Walling, set a precedent for limiting corporate attempts to evade the fair labor law.
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The post Overlooked No More: Bessie Margolin, Lawyer Who Turned Workers’ Hopes Into Law appeared first on New York Times.
