Lisa Zornberg, Author of “Entering the Arena”

Who was the first woman attorney to serve in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York? Was it Shirah Neiman, as many Assistant U.S. Attorneys in the 1980s and 1990s assumed? Was it Florence Perlow Shientag in 1943, as the New York Women’s Bar Association stated in her 1997 obituary?¹ Was it Edith Glennon in 1941, as The New York Times and other outlets reported in 1942 while highlighting her preparation for six narcotics trials – all of which resulted in convictions?² Or was it some other previously unknown early twentieth-century trailblazer? 

Lisa Zornberg has unearthed the answer, which she reveals in her just-published book, “Entering the Arena.” Featuring a decade-by-decade dive from the early 1900s – when women lawyers were known as “Portias” – through the 1970s, Zornberg provides a revealing account of the progress, setbacks, and accomplishments of women prosecutors in the Southern District against the backdrop of distinctive personalities, cases, and historical events. 

An Unexplored Field

The identity of the first woman attorney in the Southern District had been a mystery to Zornberg since at least 2012. During her tenure as Criminal Division Chief from 2016 to 2018, she had “a burning desire” to solve the mystery but lacked the time to investigate. Although she delivered a talk to her Southern District colleagues about Mary Rutter Towle, the first woman to be sworn in as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in 1921, the question continued to nag at her until the COVID-19 pandemic when she determined to find out the answer. 

Putting her prosecutorial investigative skills to work, she began her research “like an archaeologist standing on an unexplored field.” She started with cold calls to Assistant U.S. Attorneys who had served in the office in the 1970s, which she had heard through the grapevine was a decade instrumental to the success of women Assistant U.S. Attorneys in the Southern District. She then spent months paging through archives in New York and Maryland, and many more hours scouring old newspapers and on the phone with Southern District alumni, some of whom even shared with her their personal papers and photographs. 

Among the key evidence on which Zornberg relied was “SCRAPS,” a weekly internal newsletter published by Emory Buckner during his tenure as a U.S. attorney from 1925 to 1927.³ SCRAPS featured not only case updates, personnel updates, personal announcements, and office banter, but it was also Buckner’s “pulpit for training,” with each issue containing his discourse designed “to teach AUSAs how to be worthy of the positions they held.”⁴ These pithy pronouncements substantiated Zornberg’s observation that, “within his first five months in office, Emory Buckner had staffed women lawyers in all four divisions of the office – Criminal, Civil, Antitrust, and Prohibition.”⁵ Among Buckner’s hires was Ellamarye Failor, the first woman criminal prosecutor whose courtroom talents reporters colorfully recounted.

Backslide, Amnesia, and Blockade

After the decade of advancement for women in the Southern District in the Roaring Twenties, however, Zornberg recounts with disappointment the “backslide” of the 1930s, the “amnesia” of the 1940s, the further backslide of the late 1950s, during which at one point there was no woman in the office, and an eleven-year “blockade” of women criminal prosecutors during the 1960s.⁶ 

In August 1970, the blockade finally broke when a multi-front campaign pushed U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour to hire Shirah Neiman into the Criminal Division. As the decade continued, so did the hiring of women, including Barbara Ann Rowan, the first Black woman to be sworn in as an Assistant U.S. Attorney (who was at times confused for U.S. District Judge Constance Baker Motley), and Patricia Hynes, the first woman to head a Southern District unit (Consumer Fraud). Instrumental to widening the crack in the door for women were U.S. Attorneys Paul Curran, who hired six women and promoted one – Anne Sidamon-Eristoff – to chief of the Environmental Protection Unit, and Robert Fiske, Jr., who nearly quadrupled the number of women hires and “led the sea change that irrevocably and fully opened SDNY to women” (and who later was a president of the Federal Bar Council).⁷ As a result, Zornberg observes, “after 1980, it was no longer remarkable for an SDNY AUSA to be a woman.”⁸ 

While Zornberg did find out “Who was first?” – the answer to which can be found by reading her book – at least one question remained open. She unearthed rumors that the FBI investigated Dolores Faconti, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Civil Division from 1937 to 1947, over her alleged romantic ties to Frank Garofalo, an underboss in the Bonano crime family. Although Zornberg suspects that Faconti was cleared, given the length of her tenure, she awaits the outcome of her Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI – perhaps to be revealed in the paperback edition.

Pioneering Women

Zornberg describes her book as “one of the most meaningful projects of [her] life,” and “an amazing opportunity to uncover and share the history of such a respected institution.” Among the early readers was District Judge Denise L. Cote, who served as Deputy Chief of the Criminal Division from 1983 to 1985, who commented, “many of us understood the importance of Bob Fiske, Shirah Neiman, Pat Hynes and others to the history of women entering the SDNY’s criminal division. Few of us understood or even imagined what Lisa unearthed about the pioneering women from earlier decades, and the U.S. Attorneys who made their entry into the USAO possible.”